The profession that won’t take its own advice

Posted by Mike O'Brien on July 7, 2026 in Postcards from the digital frontier | Leave a comment

Marketing sells long-horizon investment to everyone but itself.

Marketing understands one thing more deeply than any other business function: that the returns which matter most are the ones that take longest to arrive. It is the argument the profession makes to every finance director who reaches for the brand budget in a difficult quarter. Trust compounds. Reputation is slow to build and quick to spend. The value of consistency cannot be read in the current period, because it accrues in the next one, and the one after that. This is marketing’s central contribution to the organisations it serves, the case for patience held against the constant pull of the immediate, and it is a genuinely valuable case because it is usually right.

Which makes it strange that the profession develops its own people in ten-week increments.

The evidence that it does comes from marketing’s own institution, and it is not flattering. When the Chartered Institute of Marketing last examined how the profession trains itself, in its 2021 Impact of Marketing research, it found that one in three marketers had undertaken no training of any kind, internal or external, in the previous two years. Among the most senior professionals the picture was worse rather than better: more than four in ten had done nothing at all. The gap widened with every band of age and seniority, from seven per cent of the youngest marketers who had gone without training to sixty-two per cent of those aged between fifty-five and sixty-four. The people with the most authority over the decisions that determine whether a brand creates durable value were, by a wide margin, the least likely to be developing their capacity to make them.

That research is now five years old, and no comparable count has been taken since. This is part of the story rather than a caveat to it. The profession noticed, once, that its most senior people had stopped learning, expressed some concern, and then largely stopped looking. A trade that measures everything it does for its clients has not thought it worth re-measuring the erosion of its own leadership capability in half a decade.

It would be easy, and wrong, to read these numbers as a failure of individual appetite, as senior marketers grown too busy or too comfortable to keep learning. That reading is too convenient, because it lets the structure off the hook and locates the problem in character. Look instead at what the training market actually offers those senior marketers, and their absence begins to look less like negligence and more like a reasonable response to provision that has narrowed to a single shape.

The market is built, almost in its entirety, to transfer skills. A skill is a bounded, teachable, demonstrable thing: it can be specified, delivered and certified inside ten weeks, and the whole visible apparatus of professional development now organises itself around that convenience. Bootcamps, microcredentials, stackable certificates, just-in-time upskilling: every one of them answers the same question, which is what a person can now do that they could not do before. And because the question is always framed that way, the answer is almost always digital execution, the analytics, the automation, the paid media, the search and the content skills that can be named on a syllabus and ticked off on completion.

Even the profession’s own body senses that something has gone wrong here. In the same research, sixty per cent of marketers said that the focus on digital skills was coming at the expense of core marketing skills. That is a remarkable thing for an institution to report about the discipline it represents: a clear majority of the profession believes that its own dominant mode of training is hollowing out the thing beneath it. The admission sits right there in the data, and it has changed almost nothing about what the market sells.

The thing beneath has a name, and naming it precisely is the whole of the argument. What the training market sells is skill. What it has very largely stopped developing is judgement. These are not the same capability, and the difference is not a matter of degree. A skill is the ability to perform a task. Judgement is the ability to decide well under pressure with incomplete information: to know which of several defensible options is right for this organisation, in this market, at this moment, and to hold that position when the evidence is ambiguous and the room is not. It is what a senior marketer is actually paid for, and it is the one thing the modular market cannot supply.

It cannot supply it because judgement is not a body of knowledge to be transferred. It is a formed capacity, built slowly through exposure to consequential decisions, structured reflection on how they turned out, and challenge from people who understand the same complexity well enough to disagree usefully. The very properties that make judgement valuable, that it takes time and cannot be shortcut, are the properties that make it impossible to package as a ten-week module and sell at scale. This is not an argument that skills training is worthless, which would overclaim and deserve the scepticism it would attract. Some skill is essential, and some judgement is built obliquely through applied practice. The argument is narrower and harder to dismiss: the market has tilted so far towards the packageable that it has stopped seriously trying to develop the rest, and has taken to calling the substitution progress.

Artificial intelligence is what turns this from a long-standing weakness into an urgent one. The skills the market has spent a decade learning to package and sell are, with uncomfortable precision, the executional skills that generative tools now perform in seconds. The reporting, the first-draft content, the routine analysis, the campaign mechanics: these were the rungs on which a marketer used to climb towards judgement, and they are being automated out from under the profession at both ends, removing the junior’s training ground and devaluing the senior’s stored expertise at the same time. The capability that survives this, the capability that becomes more valuable precisely as execution becomes cheap, is the one the market never learned to develop. Faster execution does not reduce the need for judgement. It raises it, because more decisions arrive more quickly with less time to weigh them, and the cost of deciding badly compounds faster than before. Using these tools well is itself an act of judgement rather than a technical skill, a matter of context, objectives, refinement and ethics: the capability CORE was built to describe, and one that cannot be delegated to the tool that occasions it.

The way out is not another course. It is a different understanding of what developing a marketer means, and beneath it a different logic.

The one credential that already does what the argument asks makes the point more sharply than any survey. Chartered Marketer status, awarded by the profession’s own institution, is the single qualification that has to be kept rather than merely gained: thirty-five hours of continuous development a year, logged and mandatory, forfeit the moment they lapse. It is prestigious, and trivial in cost against a marketing salary. Much of what a working marketer already does counts towards it, and the institution widened who could hold it in 2019 for the express purpose of encouraging more people to take it up. Almost nobody has. By the profession’s own published figures, more than three thousand marketers hold the status, out of over thirty thousand members, against a UK marketing workforce estimated in the low hundreds of thousands. The same country recognises more than a hundred and fifty thousand solicitors and a comparable number of chartered accountants. A profession that calls itself chartered has, in practice, declined to become so. That rules out the two consoling explanations at once. It is not that development is unavailable, since provision is everywhere. And it is not that it is being done quietly instead, since the one badge that would recognise quiet development, at almost no cost, sits unclaimed. The profession has been handed the means to treat continuous development as a standard, at a price it would never blink at for a client, and has quietly declined.

The modular market runs, in the end, on extraction: it treats the marketer as a unit of capability to be topped up and deployed, its skills replenished just enough to keep it useful for now. Developing judgement runs on the opposite logic, investment: it treats the marketer as someone whose capacity compounds when it is genuinely developed, and whose value grows rather than depreciates over time. This is the same distinction marketing already makes when it argues for brand investment over short-cycle extraction, turned now on the profession’s treatment of its own people, and it produces the same answer. Judgement develops where senior people are given consequential decisions to own, structured time to reflect on the outcomes, colleagues equipped to challenge them, and a horizon long enough for the returns to compound. None of that fits on a syllabus, and all of it can be built by an organisation that decides its leaders are worth the same patient investment it asks its clients to make in their brands.

Where long-horizon senior development has been built, and it has, it tends to sit as a specialist product for the committed few rather than the norm for the many, which is the clearest possible sign that the problem was never the absence of an answer. The infrastructure is not missing. The willingness to change behaviour is.

Which returns us to the mirror the profession would rather not look into. Marketing counsels patience to everyone else. It asks boards to invest in brands whose returns cannot be seen this quarter, and it is right to ask. It has simply never been willing to extend the same patience to the development of its own leaders. Until it does, until it treats the building of judgement as the long-horizon investment it plainly is, it will go on producing senior marketers who are fluent in execution and uncertain in judgement, at the exact moment when judgement is the only thing left that a machine cannot do for them.

Sources: Chartered Institute of Marketing, The Impact of Marketing – Digital Vision: living on the cutting edge (2021), survey of more than 1,200 UK marketers, the profession’s most recent published measure of training participation. Chartered Marketer and membership figures are CIM’s own published totals (more than 3,000 Chartered Marketers of over 30,000 members). Comparator counts for solicitors and chartered accountants from the SRA and ICAEW.