It’s no secret that technology has forever changed the way we approach and do work. However, while budgets and headcount on technology teams continue to rise, technology leaders still have a hard time finding engineering talent with the right balance of skills.
Prior to COVID-19, businesses were already thinking about transformation initiatives that would help them transition from legacy systems to allow technical teams to work in more flexible, efficient, and secure environments. Post COVID-19, these attributes are more important than ever. However, just like with any transformation initiative, these transitions require hard skills, which are in high demand but short supply.
In fact, leaders report that Cyber Security is the number one skill shortage and top investment priority, made increasingly urgent due to moving to a fully remote workforce, which has increased the likelihood of malware and phishing attacks.
From becoming cloud-native to defending against cybersecurity attacks and breaches — organizations need a wider range of engineering skills on their teams than ever before. In order to solve skill gaps and talent shortages, businesses need to consider upskilling their existing engineers on must-have skills, such as cybersecurity and rethink engineering talent acquisition and onboarding strategies to ensure they get the right balance of skills and knowledge on their teams.
Two Refreshed Programs Help to Upskill Your Engineers
Over the last ten years, we’ve been helping organizations, such as Disney and Humana, acquire and build the engineering talent they need to compete in today’s digital economy. Through deep customer, industry, and market research, we’ve updated two programs to help more organizations meet their engineering talent goals.
Get a sneak peek of what those programs entail below:
Java Developer Immersive: Expand your Java development workforce with experiential training in the most in-demand skills. Participants will build core skills in Java, Spring Boot, test-driven development, troubleshooting dev ops, cloud, and agile development. Use this program to reskill junior engineers or onboard fresh computer science graduates to your teams.
Cybersecurity Accelerator: Bulk up your cybersecurity practices by training existing developers on best practices. Participants will learn how to add security features to their web applications to minimize the chances of an attack. Use this program to upskill existing engineers to increase cybersecurity skills and knowledge within your engineering team.
These refreshed programs allow you and your team to:
Access Transformative Tech Skills: Level up your engineering team by embedding must-have cybersecurity and java development skills.
Learn From Real Industry Experts: Give your people practical, hands-on training created and taught by leading subject matter experts.
Build and Develop Engineering Talent: Invest in existing and new talent by offering them learning opportunities that move your business forward.
As Always, More to Come
We’re working on more exciting things that we’ll be releasing over the next few months, such as useful workforce insights and updated skilling solutions. Keep your eyes on the GA blog or get in touch with us to hear the latest.
Want to learn more about how we can help your organization build essential engineering skills? Download the full catalog of GA’s tech skilling solutions here.
For years, the importance of data has been echoed in boardroom discussions and listed on company roadmaps. Now, with 99% of businesses reporting active investment in big data and AI, it’s clear that all businesses are beginning to recognize the power of data to transform our world of work.
While all leaders recognize the needs and benefits of becoming data-driven, only 24% have successfully created a data-driven organization. That is because transformation is not considered holistically and instead leaders focus on business, tools and technology and talent in silos. Usually leaving skill acquisition amongst leaders and the broader organization for last. It’s no wonder that 67% of leaders say they are not comfortable accessing or using data.
We’ve worked with businesses, such as Bloomberg, to help them gain the skills they need to successfully leverage data within their organizations & we haven’t left leaders out of the conversation. In fact, we know that leaders are crucial to the success of data transformation efforts & just like their teams, they need to be equipped with the skills to understand and communicate with data.
Why Should I Train My Leaders on Data?
When embarking on a data transformation, we always recommend that leaders be trained as the first step in company-wide skill acquisition. We recommend this approach for a few reasons:
Leaders Need to Understand Their Role in Data Transformation: Analytics can’t be something data team members do in a silo. They need to be fully incorporated into the business, rather than an afterthought. However, businesses will struggle to make that change if every leader does not understand his or her responsibility in data transformation.
Leadership Training Shows a Commitment to Change: According to New Vantage Partners, 92% of data transformation failures are attributed to the inability of leaders to form a data-driven culture. In order for your employees to truly become data-driven, they have to be able to see a real commitment from leaders to organizational goals and operational change. Training your leaders first sends that message that data is here to stay.
Leaders Need to Be Prepared to Work With Data-Driven Teams: Increasingly, leaders are expected to make data-driven decisions that impact the success of the organization. Without literacy, leaders will continue to feel uncomfortable communicating with and using data to make decisions. This discomfort will trickle down to employees and real change will never be felt.
Just like your broader organization, leaders cannot be expected to understand the role they play or the importance of data transformation without proper training.
What Does Data Literacy For Leaders Look Like?
Leaders need to be able to readily identify opportunities to use data effectively. In order to get there leaders need to:
Build a Data-Driven Mindset:
While every leader brings a wealth of experience to your org, many leaders are not data natives, and it can be a big leap to make this shift in thinking. Training leaders all at once gives you the opportunity to get your leaders on the same page and build a shared understanding and vocabulary.
So what does building a data-driven mindset look like in practice? To truly have a data-driven mindset leaders must be aware of the data landscape, as well as the opportunity of data, be mindful of biases inherent in data with an eye towards overcoming that bias, as well as being curious about how data can influence our decisions.
Leaders should walk away from training with a baseline understanding of key data concepts, a shared vocabulary, knowing how data flows through an organization and be able to pinpoint where data can have an impact in the org.
Understand the Data Life Cycle
Leaders are responsible for having oversight of every phase of the data life cycle and must be able to help teams weed out bias at any point. Without this foundation, leaders will have a hard time knowing where to invest in a data transformation and how to lead projects and teams.
All leaders should be equipped to think about and ask questions about each phase of the life cycle. For example:
Data Identification: What data do we have, and what form is it in?
Data Generation: Where will the data come from and how reliable is the source?
Data Acquisition: How will the data get from the source to us?
It is not the role of the leader to know where all the data comes from or what gaps exist, but being able to understand what questions to ask, is important to acquire the necessary insights to inform a sound business strategy.
Get to Know the Role of Data Within the Org
In an organization that’s undergoing a data transformation, there’s no shortage of projects that could command a leader’s attention and investment. Leaders must be equipped to understand where to invest to put their plans into action.
Based on existing structure, leaders need to understand the key data roles, such as data analysts or machine learning engineers, why they are important and how they differ. Once a leader has the knowledge of the data teams, they will be able to identify the opportunity of data within their team and role.
Make Better Data-Driven Decisions
Leaders who rely on intuition alone run the huge risk of being left behind by competitors that use data-driven insights. With more and more companies adjusting to this new world order, it’s imperative that leaders become more data literate in order to make important business-sustaining decisions moving forward.
Leaders should walk away from training with a baseline understanding of key data concepts, a shared vocabulary, knowing how data flows through an organization and be able to pinpoint where data can have an impact in the org.
Getting Started With Leadership Training
Including data training specifically for your leaders in your data transformation efforts is crucial. While leaders are busy tackling other important business initiatives, they, just like the rest of your organization must be set up with the right skills to successfully meet the future of work. Investment in data skills for leaders will help you to forge a truly data-driven culture and business.
To learn more about how GA equips leaders and organizations to take on data transformation get in touch with us here.
Businesses have shifted from traditional ways of operating to truly becoming customer-centric digital organizations — and the global pandemic has accelerated this inevitable shift. Product managers, who sit at the nexus of customer needs, business strategy, and technology, play a critical part in building their companies’ digital fluency so organizations can evolve and transform their products to meet market and customer demands.
That said, product management is often ill-defined as a function, especially in traditional companies, and business leaders and managers have a responsibility to precisely understand product management skills and careers to help these nascent leaders succeed and unlock their full potential.
By developing and integrating product managers as strategic thinkers who help evolve organizations into being customer-centric, leaders and managers can tap into many benefits:
Improved leadership pipeline and succession planning: Product managers are responsible for many things, but skills development strategies to level-up their subject matter expertise into leadership roles are not often clear. By connecting product management skills to a long-term and articulated career path, you can improve your leadership pipeline and increase career satisfaction for your product managers.
Clear hiring objectives: Evaluating candidates against a documented set of skills can decrease bias and help recruiters make vital distinctions between hiring project managers, product managers, and product owners.
Increased product management talent pipeline: Creating consistency around what early-career professionals understand a product manager to be and what they must learn creates access to product management careers for people who don’t already have product managers in their networks.
We formed the Product Management Standards Board with a wide-ranging set of product management leaders across the consumer goods, technology, finance, and education sectors. We’ll channel our collective experience into increasing clarity of and access to product management skills and careers so that the next generation of product management talent can maximize their impact in organizations and the world.
We’ve crafted a career framework as a valuable tool for:
Product leaders who want to build capable, well-balanced teams.
Aspiring product managers who want to understand what skills they need to enter the field and help lead organizations.
Mid-career professionals who wish to understand their career options.
HR leaders who want to build transparent, consistent career pathways.
What Defines an Excellent Product Manager?
We drafted a career map that captures our collective thinking about what makes a product manager and the career paths and associated skills required for an employee to one day become a product leader.
Let’s break down each section of the framework and see how they’re used to guide career progression.
Associate Product Manager
To begin a career in product management, individuals often move into associate product management roles from within or outside an organization with some existing understanding of the business, product, and/or customer base. While we firmly believe anyone can become a product manager starting at the associate level, we commonly see analysts, software engineers, designers, project managers, or product marketers moving into this role. In this stage of career development, product managers learn to use data to make decisions, influence without authority, and understand the balancing act of prioritization.
Product Manager
Product managers learn a mix of skills based on their particular product, area of responsibility, and expertise. Product managers in charge of a new product or feature may heavily focus on research and development. In contrast, product managers responsible for improving the quality and efficacy of an existing product or feature may focus more on data analysis to understand what drives an improved experience.
Squad leadership is critical to ensuring all people understand the goal they are working towards and what success will look like.Product managers at a large organization have the opportunity to either specialize in a single domain or can work with their managers to rotate ownership over product areas to develop a breadth of experience and skills.
Product managers at a startup will likely get to experience all of these skills in rapid rotation as their teams iterate quickly to identify product-market-fit and the right set of features for their product.
Senior Product Manager
The senior product manager level is where product managers start differentiating between becoming “craftmasters” in the individual contributor path or people managers on the leadership path. While craftmasters still need to provide inspiring team leadership to those working on the product, they often become particularly versed in a product domain, like product growth and analytics.
In contrast, a people manager in this role largely focuses on team management skills. Either way, this role is a critical step in someone’s career as it allows them an opportunity to practice developing and sharing a vision for a product with their team and working with more moving parts to guide people towards that vision. Understanding and prioritizing these moving parts become a key skill to develop at this level.
Additionally, the responsibilities to make decisions related to product growth also increase here. This level is a product manager’s opportunity to demonstrate an understanding of how business, market, and product intersect to inform the direction of the product and distinctly articulate how they expect that product to impact the company’s financials.
Director of Product
At this career point, directors of product are making a critical transition from manager to leader. They have to bring the threads of the product strategy and the product roadmap together and take ownership and responsibility for their decisions and impact. The Director of Product also starts to gain ownership of the cost side of their decisions – at some companies, this can extend as far as P&L ownership for project and product costs. They move into managing a portfolio of products and connecting the dots between how they work collectively for users and guide teams to work through complex problems to develop goals on a longer, future-driven timeline.
VP or Head of Product
Once an individual reaches this leadership level, they have mastered the key functional skills of product. They are now the pivotal connection point between the rest of the company’s leadership plans and the product team. They have to get beyond “product speak” and help connect the dots between technology, customers, and business goals with other leaders and employees across the business. There is a fair amount of time spent aligning resources and plans with other leaders to drive the strategy forward. As product leaders, they are also driving innovative thinking and are responsible for either the entirety of the product or a significant portfolio in terms of the company’s financials.
A Few Notes
We’ve had many rich discussions while building out the career map and teased out some nuances listed below that may come to mind as you work your way through this framework.
What about a product owner?
While product owners play a critical function, we do not see this as being a distinct job title for someone. If you’re curious about the distinction and who might play a product ownership function in your teams, read Product Dave on Medium.
What about the difference between startups and large organizations and everything in-between?
Product leaders at a large organization should consider rotating their product managers between a few different areas before moving them into more senior roles to build a range of skills sustainably. Product managers at a startup will likely get to experience all of these skills in rapid succession as their teams iterate quickly to identify product-market-fit and the right set of features for their product.
Does the framework change for “craftmaster” vs. “leadership” paths?
We have focused this framework more on the leadership path, but there is a continued path as an individual contributor, especially within larger organizations. Senior product managers, principals, and distinguished product management roles often see product managers tackle increasingly complex problems and mentor their colleagues on critical product skills while remaining in the “craftmaster” path.
Where do tangential functions fit in?
Some roles work closely with product managers to enable the full execution of products, but they are excluded on this map as they are adjacent to a product manager career path. A few of these functions include pricing analysts, product marketers, and product operations.
What happens after VP of Product?
The next step after VP of Product is very dependent on the organization. Some VPs of Product already report to the CEO or a business unit owner, in which case, those roles would be the next step. In other organizations, a Chief Product Officer role exists and becomes the next step. Data from Emsi shows that there has been a 140% increase in CPO postings from Nov 2019 to Nov 2020; a clear reflection of organizations’ increasing awareness of the value of the role of product leadership in aligning customer needs, technology, and business strategy, and the increasing number of opportunities for advancement to the executive suite in this field.
Next Steps: Putting Words Into Action
We formed the Product Management Standards Board to increase clarity of and access to skills and careers so the next generation of product management talent can maximize their global impact in organizations. Our career framework is a first step toward achieving this goal, but it’s only effective if followed by action.
To put this theory into action, we have started using this framework within our organizations to:
Explain career progression and roles across our teams to guide development conversations and linking individual activities to strategic objectives on our product teams.
Guide high-potential employees on how to maximize their leadership skills.
Evaluate job candidates based on their skills match with the function for which they are applying, rather than exclusively what schools they’ve gone to or previous roles they’ve held.
If you could benefit from these same actions, we encourage you to join us in using the framework for similar purposes in your organizations. Our industry needs to use a common language around product management, and that language extends beyond our board.
This is a living document, and we’ll be seeking feedback from partners in our executive teams, industry associations, and peers around the world. We’re also asking you. If you have feedback on how this could be useful for you, please let us know at cheers@ga.co.
By coalescing on what it takes to succeed in product management careers, we can begin to solve some of the pertinent talent challenges facing the profession and better prepare the next generation of leaders. We look forward to working to standardize product management career paths together.
We are in the midst of a grand economic experiment catalyzed by COVID-19 to accelerate digital transformation efforts in almost every business. The days of arguing whether digital transformation is the right path are over. Simply put, companies that don’t modernize will fail. That said, not every company is on the same journey. By the end of 2019, nearly 20% of enterprise organizations had not started digital transformation efforts. Another 40% said they were currently undergoing it, and budgets are rising to match. IDC forecasts global spending for digital transformation rose by about 17.9% in 2019 to $1.18 trillion. Partially due to COVID-19, that number is expected to increase by another 10.4% in 2020.
If you asked businesses before the pandemic about the importance of digital transformation, most would agree that it was important, but not all would prioritize it in the same ways. However, digitization becomes crucial very quickly when tens of millions of people must work from home, and non-essential businesses are closed to foot traffic.
Look at the shift in global consumer sentiment in the first week of May:
While some of these shifts were temporary, many are not. We see fundamental changes in the way the economy works. A recent IDG survey found that 59% of IT decision-makers have accelerated their efforts with spending likely to grow by more than 10% in 2020. Demand for skills in technology, data analysis, product, marketing, and UX are higher than ever as companies shift to a new model that emphasizes remote operations.
Time is no longer a luxury for organizations that had not yet started or been in the early stages of planning digital transformation efforts. The new normal requires businesses to be agile and digital.
What is a Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the process of remodeling existing business processes to meet the current market — specifically, the needs of the customer. Until recently, that included banks implementing mobile apps and investing heavily in FinTech, or healthcare organizations digitizing records and connecting devices and people seamlessly across a large network, etc. Digital transformation was previously about supplementing existing offerings with new technologies that met consumers where they were most likely to engage.
Post-COVID-19, digital transformation is still about these things. One of the many challenges large organizations have with digital transformation is that they attempt to implement small efforts within silos in a much larger company infrastructure — digital transformation is bigger than that. It’s about recognizing the core ways to interact with customers and making smart investments to address specific challenges.
Why is digital transformation different from simple digitization? The latter is about shifting away from paper-based and analog processes. It’s about making data accessible to everyone in an organization and connecting employees at all levels. Digital transformation is about leveraging those changes to improve the relationship between your company and your customers with things like personalized messaging, configurable products and services, and more accessible, catered customer service offerings.
Of course, these efforts can be difficult to execute. To date, less than 30% of them have succeeded, and only 16% have improved performance and resulted in long-term changes. While smaller businesses (those with fewer than 100 employees) are significantly more likely to succeed, enterprise organizations are challenged to realize demonstrable returns. However, it’s not the concept that’s flawed; it’s the process. Too many organizations start from the top, thinking of the technologies and tools and not the people who will implement them.
Digital transformation relies on people at multiple levels. Not only are highly skilled individuals in marketing, IT, and product required to implement new initiatives, the entire workforce must buy into these changes. Without high levels of adoption, large investments in new software and processes can quickly look like mistakes.
Why Are Digital Transformations Important?
More than 80% of decision-makers in technology and engineering see a mismatch between the skills workers have, and the skills companies need. The biggest gaps are in strategic thinking and analysis: data analytics, data science, innovation strategy, and web development, among others. That talent gap with organizations is growing as more companies are eager to bring on top-tier talent to steer their efforts into the next decade. Digitization addresses this by leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to support internal workers and enable the development of the right skills for the necessary work.
Furthermore, companies should be looking at the staff they already have to see how they can help support digital transformation goals. The Build vs. Buy Approach to Talent allows companies to build internal competencies that support digital transformation. We know that 75% of digital transformations fail because companies focus on systems instead of including talent as a critical enabler. Of the large chunk that fails, 70% are due to a lack of user adoption and behavioral change. Digital transformation isn’t only about buying the flashiest new tools. It’s about crafting a strategy that your employees are willing and able to implement. You need buy-in from every level of an organization. When employees embrace the concept of digital transformation, technology becomes secondary. As employees work in ways they never have before, this is more important than ever.
This might all sound like a lot of work. Coming into 2021, many companies had long put off this process because of that perception. But, the growth potential is staggering. MGI estimated that an additional $13 trillion could be added to global GDP in just 10 years by implementing AI, automation, and digitization. Despite that, only 25% of the economic potential of digitization has yet been captured. And that’s the average. In some industries, the digital frontier gap is significantly larger — especially in revenue generation, automation, and digitization of the workforce.
Despite the delays before this year, many chief executives now see the value of digital transformation. Two-thirds of CEOs expect to change their business models due to digital technologies, and 77% of digitally mature companies are more likely to grow digital roles in the next three years. These trends have only continued in light of COVID-19. A July survey showed that the number of days spent at home by employees had grown four-fold. Ultimately, all remote employees require technological support. Think about all the technology that we rely upon that needs adequate support, too: Cloud-based applications. WAN modernization efforts to support a dispersed workforce and maintain network security. Improvements to active directory and identity management.
The impact of digital transformation efforts leads to fundamental changes in departmental models as well. Marketing, for example, is leveraging AI to improve the customer experience across the board. With 80% of companies now using AI chatbots and 84% of customer-focused companies spending heavily to improve mobile experiences, the way organizations engage with prospects and customers has fundamentally changed in the last half-decade.
The Impact of Digital Transformation (Done Right)
Over the past six months, workforce digitization has accelerated faster than at any point in the last twenty years. For organizations ahead of the game, it was a chance to put their innovative efforts to the test. For those who had delayed digital transformation initiatives, it was a major challenge. With limited resources, a highly competitive talent pool, and an uncertain future reshaped by the events of 2020, it’s more important than ever to develop a strategy that guides your business forward. This is a massive opportunity for leaders who understand the moment we are in, to arm their organizations with the tools, resources, and processes needed to succeed.
Where are you observing digital skill gaps within your organization? Learn more about how we can help.
Data is integral to every business. It helps organizations set strategies, report on wins and losses, make smarter business decisions, and is the connective tissue between leaders and teams. However, as businesses lean into a data-first future, through digital transformation, they must also take into account the skills needed to successfully leverage data.
According to New Vantage Partners, only 24% of organizations have successfully become data-driven. Organizations undergoing data transformations don’t typically fail because of tools or technology but because of talent-related challenges, such as cultural resistance and lack of leadership, contributing to a general discomfort communicating with and using data. A study by Accenture confirms that 74% of employees feel overwhelmed or unhappy when working with data.
It’s time to change all of that. Investment in data upskilling for existing talent is a step in the right direction for businesses hoping to benefit from the full use of data and AI. From mindset training for leaders to upskilling functional practitioners on modern practices to fluency for the broader organization, businesses must begin to see the opportunity and importance of data transformation in the context of employee skills.
Introducing Four New Training Programs to Embed Data Skills Into Your Organization
We’ve had the pleasure of helping businesses, such as Guardian and Booz Allen Hamilton, build data-driven workforces from within through upskilling and reskilling. Our work with the AI & Data Science Standards Board and our customer and industry research helps us to understand what training each employee — from leader to contributor— needs to successfully leverage data within their roles.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, we saw an opportunity to further enable teams to transform into data-driven organizations. Over the last few months, we’ve been hard at work refreshing existing training programs for leaders and functional practitioners and building new ones for the broader organization, all connecting to the most emergent data-skilling needs.
Here’s a quick overview of those programs:
Data Literacy On Demand [New]: Data literacy for all employees has become a must-have for businesses striving to build a data-first culture. This flexible training solution fits right into your employee’s workflow and gives them the foundational knowledge they need to start interpreting and communicating with data.
Building Data Literacy [New]: For deeper, more targeted data literacy training, we created a brand new workshop, Building Data Literacy. Use Building Data Literacy to train smaller cohorts of employees or as a deeper, more hands-on follow-up to Data Literacy On Demand.
AI for Leaders [Refreshed]: We refreshed our AI for Leaders workshop to better focus on giving organizations a place to start when considering AI. This approach for getting started with AI was validated by our AI & Data Science Standards Board members.
Advanced Analytics Accelerator [Refreshed]: Advanced Analytics Accelerator is one of our most popular data programs. We used client feedback to develop a new assessment approach and refresh the curriculum to better meet learner needs. New assessments help show learner uplift and mastery of concepts covered in the program.
These new programs will allow you to:
Take the First Step With Data & AI: Move transformation initiatives forward by giving every audience in your business foundational data and AI skills.
Stay on the Cutting-Edge With Content Validated by Experts: Give your people real world, actionable insights with training programs that are created with and delivered by subject matter experts.
Reach Employees With Relevant Training: Maximize learner retention with curricula designed and delivered in the right format for your learning objectives.
More to Come
Over the next few months, we will be releasing more useful workforce insights, updated training programs, and more. Keep your eyes on the GA blog or get in touch with us to hear the latest.
Want to learn more about how we can help your organization lean into a data-first future? Download the full catalog of GA’s data skilling solutions here.
Systemic racism has been a critical problem for generations, and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has brought centuries of injustice to the spotlight. Over the last six months, following the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many others, individuals worldwide have taken a stand to fight oppression and discrimination against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).
It’s an inflamed and sensitive time that calls for radical change. Diverse companies not only outperform their less diverse peers, but they also forge stronger connections with their customers. 77% of U.S. consumers said it was “deeply important that companies respond to racial injustice to earn or keep their trust.” As consumer bases diversify and consumers change their spending habits, companies need to ensure that their content, messaging, product, design, and data align with these shifts. While organizations know they need stronger commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), many don’t know where to start — individual companies often take action but lack coordinated guidance.
Our Standards Boards were established to increase the clarity of and access to careers in marketing, AI & data science, product management, and UX design. To date, the Boards have primarily focused on providing clarity on the skills needed within specific fields by publishing career frameworks and certifications. Now, it’s time to connect to the access portion of their work. Together, the Standards Boards have crafted DEI principles that guide organizations on how to provide equitable access to skills and career paths for their employees.
Improving Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion: A Practical Guide
To create a meaningful guide to DEI, our Standards Board Members reflected on what diversity, equity, and inclusion meant as individuals, employees, and leaders of organizations. With this in mind, we focused on improving the current DEI practices each member saw being used and creating a practical playbook that could be applied across companies and disciplines. Ultimately, we hope this playbook serves as a starting point for conversations around DEI that lead to career paths for diverse talent and helps leaders create work environments in which all can succeed.
Our Standards Board DEI task force drafted a playbook of seven overarching principles that have been refined through feedback from colleagues, DEI experts, GA instructors and staff, plus more. These principles were designed to guide any organization’s DEI strategy, regardless of function, industry, geography, or company size.
These principles were created by leaders in various industries who have a real conviction for driving change. Below, you’ll find a few principles our board members stand behind; they hope you’ll use these to drive conversations and assess how your organization is implementing DEI.
“We all recognize a critical need to address systemic issues with diversity, equity, and inclusion through actions — not just words. These principles were created to support action plans for every company to ensure a culture of belonging for all employees, at all levels throughout the organization.”
We hope these principles spark conversations at your organizations that lead to tactical activities such as revisiting policies, analyzing pay equity, and tracking diversity data. While some of these principles are being implemented across board member organizations, some aren’t. Our intention is to enable organizations to implement DEI policies across every level of an organization through actions, not just words.
The Actions We Are Taking
It’s essential that these aforementioned principles are put into action. Across the Standards Boards, we’ll be incorporating DEI into career frameworks, assessments, and products. We’ll also be actively recruiting more board members in 2021 to ensure our boards are representative of the talent in their industries.
Within GA, we’re also committed to aligning these principles with our work. We’re actively promoting equity and justice by using our platform to discuss why we should all be angry, and we’re making real commitments to ensure we’re not idle in the face of systemic racism. We’re cultivating conversations about our diversity story and creating a culture of dissent through creating an Inclusion Committee as well as a Fireside Chat series that brings employees and executives together for candid conversations on D&I (both started in 2019).
We’re cultivating our future employee base by updating our policies to require a diverse slate of interview candidates for all leadership-level positions, revisiting internal promotion criteria, and launching a mentorship program (Code Grow) so our Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) staff has formal avenues to develop their careers. To attract diverse talent, we are utilizing outlier career-search platforms like AngelList, Underdog.io, Vettery, c0ffe3, Black Creatives, and more.
We’re transparent about the areas of difference we’re cultivating by reformalizing our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) with dedicated executive sponsors. And we’re tying outcomes to actions by measuring all our people metrics and making plans to improve the experiences of underrepresented groups in our organization. We’re also ensuring DEI is central in our product development.
The principles set forward by the Standards Boards are essential to capturing many voices across multiple sectors because they encapsulate what has been learned on our individual and collective journeys. We look to evolving and integrating these principles into GA’s courses, continue the hard work and commitment to DEI at GA, and further develop organizational behaviors, along with the willingness of our Standards Board partners to do the same.
The list below notes the leaders that have signed on. If you’re a leader who is ready to join us and adopt these principles, you can sign on here.
Participating Leaders:
Shri Bhupathi, Founder and Technical Fellow, MILL5 Gideon Bullock Andrea Chesleigh Chad Evans, SVP, Product and Platform, NBA Stephen Gates Benjamin Harrell, Chief Marketing Officer, Priceline Marla Kaplowitz, President and CEO, 4A’s Willy Lai Louis Lecat Kevin Lyons, SVP of Technology, Nielsen Francisco Martin, Head of Business Development, Thrive Global Marilyn McDonald, SVP of B2B Experiences, Mastercard Kristof Neirynck, CMO of Global Brands, Walgreens Boots Alliance Gretchen O’Hara, VP of AI & Sustainability, Strategy & Partnership, Microsoft Michelle Onvural, CEO, Bonobos Seth Rogin, CEO, Magnolia Media Partners Nick Perugini Adam Powers Professor Andrew Stephen, Associate Dean of Research & L’Oréal Professor of Marketing Linda Tong, General Manager, AppDynamics (a Cisco Company) Sang Valte, UX Director, Jellyfish
It’s a new world that calls for moral bravery and clear actions. We welcome all feedback on these principles and look forward to hearing how your organization implements these and other DEI initiatives.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a rapid and forced transformation of many businesses. Plans that companies previously anticipated rolling out over many years have been decided and implemented in weeks.
Amid this rapid change where many are scrambling to adapt, leaders should ask themselves what other “five-year plans” should fastrack to keep pace with these critical business plans. One of the plans that companies should evaluate is talent development: how can businesses develop strategic plans to meet the needs of their rapidly evolving businesses?
Creating talent development work isn’t as easy as providing online learning to employees. Our Marketing Standards board members met recently and uncovered an unexpected commonality. While all of them are making learning available to their employees, the primary area for improvement on their employee engagement surveys continues to be upskilling. This revelation brought on a layered conversation about the common challenges employers face when it comes to engaging employees in training and development — especially when these pieces of training are online. So, what’s causing the disconnect between desire and action on upskilling employees, and most importantly, what can leaders do about it?
Understanding the Disconnect
Upskilling is urgent for employers — especially for newer professionals who aren’t going to be satisfied in their jobs if there are no learning (or advancement) opportunities. Employees don’t merely want a job; they want to work for companies they can learn from and grow within; employees wish to build careers.
In a Deloitte survey, 90% of employees said their organizations were redesigning jobs. The World Economic Forum reported that more than half of all its employees would require reskilling or upskilling to address the digital skills gaps driven by changing job requirements over the next three years.
For many reasons like these, our board members agree that it’s an employer’s responsibility to make learning available and an integrated part of the employee experience.
So, what’s getting in the way of learning — from the employee perspective?
Two big factors are time and incentive. Many employees feel like there’s not enough time during the workday to take the training accessible to them. Others don’t prioritize upskilling because although they want new and updated skills, there is no extrinsic motivator for learning them. One of the clearest opportunities for extrinsic motivation often isn’t clearly connected to training: it’s the idea that training and skills are requisite expectations for the job or performance. The right jobs motivate all of us.
Possible Solutions
Providing employees with upskilling opportunities signals to them that they are valued and that they have a future within their workplace organization. However, offering a training program isn’t enough — the implementation of these programs must be intentional, structured, and relevant. During our conversation, board members came up with tips that can help companies foster a learning-positive workplace. These tips include:
1. Partner With Leadership to Allocate Time During the Workday
Big roadblocks employees face: blocking time to make learning important and creating company-wide time blocks, like “No Meetings Fridays,” to provide designated time for employee upskilling. Making these time blocks company-wide is critical. If some teams aren’t participating in it, they’ll throw a meeting on the calendar that conflicts with the learning time. At that point, you’ve lost the consistent open time and original initiative purpose you’re trying to create for your team.
2. Extrinsic Incentives: Compelling Rewards
Extrinsic incentives are tangible motivators that can encourage employees to take an upskilling training course. Offering incentives gives employees a clear prize at the end of their experience, plus an added incentive to complete learning by a particular due date. This specific incentive is a nice touch from board member Gretchen Saegh (CMO of L’Oréal USA), who plans on rewarding “the best re-scorer” of the CM1 assessment with being “CMO for the day.” These empowering incentives give employees a sense of purpose, a structured career path, and long-term vision, giving them valuable real-world experiences and advice that can be difficult to get elsewhere.
Extrinsic Incentives: Executive Messaging on Expectations
When employees see their managers endorsing upskilling, and also see the executive team pushing for the same thing, it speaks volumes about the value of upskilling within that organization and the expectations around completing tasks and initiatives surrounding it. The bottom line is that upskilling gains immediate credibility when employees see it supported by leadership. A message from the CEO and executive team is imperative when it comes to setting the tone for a company, as a message from “the top” can have a ripple effect throughout the organization.
Getting employees to translate the desire-to-action key values of online learning is particularly pertinent as more employers look for efficient and effective ways to train their employees remotely via online training providers. It’s a new world, and there’s no magic bullet, hidden secrets, and there are certainly no shortcuts. The right online training is thoughtful and methodical: it considers human behavior, personal motivations, and leadership alignment + support to get online training to occur and resonate for employees — from entry-level positions to the C-suite.
Finally, there’s the process of trial and error. Although initiatives often start with the strongest and best of intentions, the most successful training results adapt and fluctuate over time. No plan is flawless right out of the gate — however well-planned or well-intended.
Learning is always a journey.
To learn more about how General Assembly can help guide your company’s talent transformation, check out our enterprise marketing solutions.
Looking inside of a new roadmap of core skills to drive vision and leadership in the industry to see what it takes to be a leader in marketing?
This ideal skill set has changed dramatically in recent years as the responsibilities and experience of today’s marketers have expanded in scope. While strengths that used to set marketers apart — like crafting a powerful brand voice and a brilliant go-to-market strategy — are still more important than ever, leaders today need to be savvier with marketing technology, data fluent, and measurement focused. They must be equipped to decide which systems power their strategies, connect the customer experience across an array of channels, and address new innovations such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. They are also accountable for demonstrating and optimizing ROI.
As marketing’s purview has widened, we’ve seen individual roles become increasingly narrow and specialized, creating silos of digital capability. Budding marketers often focus on technical skills around a specific set of digital tools such as Optimizely and AdWords that translate to growing sub-fields, including conversion rate optimization and SEO/SEM.
The problem with this approach is that by focusing on a limited set of tactical skills rather than the broader goals those skills help achieve, marketers risk losing visibility into how brands grow. They also lose the ability to solve complex problems that span beyond their immediate domain.
This creates several human capital challenges:
Lack of leadership development: A narrow skill set is not suited to leadership roles in marketing, which increasingly require synthesis across social channels and touchpoints.
Lack of career guidance: To grow beyond narrow domains, marketers need clear guidance on what skills and industry experience they should develop and what career options become available as a result.
Lack of clarity in hiring: Without clarity around the essential marketing skills or how to assess for them, recruiters can only guess at who might be a high-potential candidate. And without clear expectations, new hires are not set up for marketing success.
To better prepare the next generation of marketers, leaders across the industry urgently need to come together to explain the broad skill set needed for marketing success in the field today. As a wide-ranging set of good marketing leaders across the consumer goods, technology, publishing, and education sectors, we formed the Marketing Standards Board to channel our collective experience toward this purpose. With the goal of defining excellence in the field and providing transparency into marketing careers, we’ve crafted a framework that will help provide this clarity for individuals, teams, and business partners.
What Makes a Marketer?
Marketing is comprised of four major functions, each with a distinct goal:
Brand: Define and communicate brand purpose, value, and experience.
Brand marketers are responsible for brand strategy, brand communications, and working across the organization to create a holistic customer experience.
Sample job titles: VP of global brand, director of integrated marketing, brand manager
Acquisition: Win new customers for your products and services.
Acquisition marketers are responsible for acquiring customers within a given budget. They run campaigns and think strategically to improve performance.
Sample job titles: Director of search engine marketing, lead generation specialist
Retention and Loyalty: Retain customers and expand share of wallet.
Retention and loyalty marketers are responsible for engaging customers. They deeply understand consumer behavior and work to maximize customer lifetime value.
Sample job titles: Manager of CRM, director of brand activation
Analytics and Insights: Get business insights and drive ROI using data.
Marketing analysts are responsible for analyzing increasingly large volumes of data to derive insight that informs business decisions.
Sample job titles: Marketing analytics manager, data scientist — marketing.
These four functions are common threads of marketing success, and they frame goals that haven’t changed over time. They were true when TV, print, and radio were the dominant media, remain true today with the prominence of web and mobile, and will remain true for whatever media and products come next. Although the execution required to achieve these goals has changed due to new tools and technology, the underlying purpose provides a stable frame of reference to understand and explain our profession.
Experienced marketers will often prioritize the skills needed for their role spread across more than one of these functions, given that a single role is often accountable for multiple goals that require a blend of skills.
A Career Framework for Marketing
With the four functions of marketing in mind, we have drafted a framework that captures our collective thinking about the career paths and associated skills required in marketing today.
Let’s break down each section of the framework and how we see it being used to guide career progression.
Level 1: Foundation
To begin a career in marketing, individuals need the bundle of skills in Level 1, from understanding customer insight to marketing technology. These skills allow them to be valuable early-career professionals, and are essential irrespective of company type, stage, and industry. From an HR perspective, Level 1 encompasses the set of required skills for most entry-level and early-career marketing candidates. They are the building blocks of marketing success that are needed and can be assessed for, regardless of one’s future career path.
Level 2: Application (Mid-Level)
Level 2 is for mid-career professionals and includes the four key functions we identified above. After demonstrating strong fundamentals from Level 1, most marketers will find that their career paths grow into a mix of Level 2 applications. Not all mid-career professionals need or desire expertise in all four areas — many will find their talents best suited in one or two. However, awareness of the full spectrum can identify strengths on which to double down and gaps that may lead a marketer to seek more support from others on their team.
For example, there are brand managers who are incredible at building out brand identity and communicating the value to consumers. They are clearly Level 2 marketers specializing in brand, even though they use acquisition and retention strategies to execute on their objectives. Similarly, there are search engine marketing managers (Level 2 marketers in acquisition) who are tremendously effective at finding new customers, and CRM managers (Level 2 marketers in retention) who specialize in engaging and delighting existing customers. Finally, new roles have emerged that are as much data professional as marketer, and as such we see Level 2 marketers in analytics.
It’s our job as leaders to guide team members toward Level 2 applications based on talent and interest, and define with our HR colleagues which (and how many) Level 2 skills are needed in each role, at each stage of seniority. Skills across these Level 2 applications, paired with strong vision and judgement, will prepare individuals to become marketing leaders.
Level 3: Leadership (Senior Role/Management)
For team members who seek leadership roles, Level 3 contains the bundle of additional skills needed to be successful marketing directors, vice presidents, senior vice presidents, and, ultimately, chief marketing officers. While having Level 3 skills does not make a leader, a leader typically possesses all of the Level 3 skills. At the leadership level, overall domain expertise and verbal communication skills becomes as important as setting the vision and strategy for the marketing team. Because these roles require problem-solving across the specialties of marketing, from customer experience to tech and data, successful Level 3s have often covered more than one Level 2 during their careers.
Next Steps: Putting Words Into Action
We formed the Marketing Standards Board six months ago to provide clarity into marketing careers for individuals, teams, and business partners. Our career framework is a first step toward achieving this goal, but it’s only effective if followed by action.
Our goal is for this career framework to be a valuable tool for:
Aspiring marketers who want to understand what skills they need to enter the field.
Mid-career professionals who want to understand their career options.
Marketing leaders who want to build capable, well-balanced teams.
HR leaders who want to build transparent, consistent career pathways.
To put this theory into action, we are going to use this framework within our organizations to:
Explain career progression and roles across our teams. We’ll use the framework to guide development conversations by linking individual marketing activities to strategic objectives on our marketing teams.
Guide high-potential employees on how to round out their skills. Point to individual strengths and gaps in Level 2 applications and Level 3 skills to support conversations with team members who show potential to take their career to the next level.
Evaluate job candidates based on the function for which they are applying. Use one or more assessments to define and validate skills needed in open positions.
If you could benefit from these same actions, we encourage you to join us in using the framework for similar purposes in your own organizations. Our industry needs to use a common language around marketing, and that language extends beyond our board.
In parallel, we’re seeking feedback from our colleagues and friends to refine this framework. We’re starting with partners in our executive teams, industry associations, and peers around the world. We’re also asking you. If you have feedback on how this could be useful for you, let us know at credentials@ga.co.
By coalescing on what it takes to succeed in marketing businesses, we can begin to examine some of the big talent strengths and weaknesses in the profession and better prepare the next generation of successful marketing leaders. We analyzed 20K+ Certified Marketer Level 1 assessment results; download The State of Skills: Marketing 2020 report to find out what we discovered.
The scoping and planning phase is an incredibly important but frequently overlooked element when developing a digital training or transformation program. L&D executives and training sponsors are often bombarded with feedback, including questions, opinions, and pressure to quickly move on launching a solution, which can often lead insufficient planning.
In hearing from large organizations across the globe, GA’s corporate training team has found that an underinvestment in scoping corporate training programs can result in substantial rework, delayed launch dates, and disappointing program outcomes due to prevalent knowledge gaps.
Six countries’ skill-building programs and policy initiatives in the age of automation.
Today’s workforce and the workforce of tomorrow is not just changing. It’s undergoing a seismic shift that, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, “is happening ten times faster and at 300 times the scale, or roughly 3,000 times the impact” compared to the Industrial Revolution.
The reality is that professionals grapple with a volatile economy where the shelf-life of skills is shrinking, hybrid jobs are increasing, and fears about automation’s disruptive impact on the job market make headlines every week. In the U.S., despite surging stocks and historic GDP growth, people’s incomes and wages haven’t kept up and income inequality continues to accelerate.
Around the globe, governments and employers alike recognize that areas such as AI and automation are quickly reshaping the global workforce. And the gap between the skills workers have and the skills companies need is growing wider as workers struggle to keep pace with emerging technologies in fast-growing industries.
In my role at General Assembly, I get the opportunity to speak with U.S. policymakers and analysts who grapple with employment and workforce development issues, and formulate solutions to ensure Americans can succeed in the new world of work. In these conversations, examples of education and workforce investment models spearheaded in other cities and countries often come up, and how we might repurpose them. Global training providers like GA are also partnering with organizations to craft upskilling and reskilling programs that arm professionals with cutting-edge skills, and also generate creative sources for talent in an increasingly competitive market.
We know technology is rapidly changing and transforming the global workforce. What’s less clear is how this transformation will take place — and what policymakers, learning and development providers, and business leaders should be doing to prepare for the future in the labor force.
Navigating the Future of Work Through a Global Lens
In our new white paper, which we developed in collaboration with Whiteboard Advisors and features a foreword from former Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Seth Harris, we uncover a lot of useful insights about how the U.S. and other industrialized nations are navigating these employment and workforce issues. Our study examines the experience and policy initiatives of six countries — Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Singapore, and Switzerland — and their strategies to improve upskilling, economic mobility, and employability in an evolving, and, at times, turbulent marketplace.
While the U.S. economy and labor market have unique characteristics with a diverse workforce, we discovered there are lessons to be learned from other developed economies pursuing workforce development programs and initiatives.
As American politicians, educators, and business leaders, we must ask ourselves: How can the startling impact of these innovative approaches be applied within a U.S. context and environment? It’s a question industry stakeholders and experts have posed to the General Assembly with increased frequency since we were acquired by The Adecco Group in April 2018. As the largest human capital solutions company in the world, The Adecco Group is an active participant in the highly successful Swiss apprenticeship model, a government-led initiative that provides young Swiss professionals paid apprenticeships designed in partnership with Swiss companies, and that’s recognized around the world as a paradigm for work-based learning.
Putting the Future of Work in a Global Context offers a high-level analysis of these and other examples of skill- and employability-building initiatives in industrialized nations, as well as a few observations:
Nobody has it figured out. Even when there are highly sophisticated programs in place that combine the best of the public, private, and social sectors, these programs haven’t always had the desired impact. For example, France’s Personal Training Account (“Compte personnel de formation” or the CPF) enables private and public sector employees to track work hours, which turn into credits for vocational and professional training schemes. On paper, access to training dollars with no strings attached seems like a surefire way to ensure French citizens can consistently upskill and reskill. However, just 6% of French workers took advantage of the training, despite the reality that 64% of that population would like to retrain in different fields or career paths.
Exportability is great in theory but tough in practice. Most of these programs are inextricably linked to the highly specific dynamics among labor market actors — companies, unions, and education and training providers — within each country, making it hard to replicate the best ideas elsewhere. Denmark’s “Flexicurity” model has some incredibly compelling features. Workers have greater security through generous government-funded unemployment benefits and education, retraining, and job training opportunities that help them return quickly to the labor market after they lose a job. Employers also win thanks to flexible contracts that allow them to hire and fire at will without incurring excessive costs for dismissing employees. As a result, litigation due to dismissals is rare. It would be difficult to imagine this program functioning in a large, heterogeneous country like the United States, which lacks the same tight alignment between government, employers, and trade unions.
There are still many good ideas worth exploring further. That’s not to say there isn’t massive potential in these models, which can inform U.S. domestic education and workforce policy. Given the breadth and variety of American industry, it would be hard to imagine the level of coordination and cohesion, which has made the Vocational and Professional Education and Training System (VPET) such a success story in Switzerland, working stateside. With that said, many of the guiding principles — stackable credentials, designated learning pathways, and funded apprenticeships — could be replicated in the U.S. It’s already happening: the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce, along with Accenture, delivered an in-depth report in 2017 that demonstrated how various Swiss companies have adapted the VET program, some for more than 10 years, for their U.S. operations.
Today’s increasingly global workplace demands a more nuanced, comprehensive understanding of the different ways governments and industries are addressing and responding to economic mega trends. Our hope is that this paper can begin a conversation about the lessons, ideas, and insights that other countries have to share with U.S. policymakers, employers, and practitioners on how to respond to and anticipate the future of work and education.
