A few months ago, a mentor asked me a question I had never been asked before: why do I have all these marketing qualifications? I was actually caught off guard. People had expressed admiration before, but nobody had ever questioned the reasoning behind my love for marketing education. When I collected my thoughts, I told him my story. A biochemistry graduate who found himself in sales (banking), then worked his way into marketing and communications consulting, I spent years deliberately building formal marketing knowledge to close the gap between what I was doing professionally and what I actually understood at a strategic level.
I’ve always believed that if you love what you do and take it seriously, you’d want to get as much education and training to become great at it. The best way to show respect and honour to a profession is by immersing oneself in a well rounded, broad and deep knowledge of it. This entails having an understanding of the profession’s purpose and role in society, awareness of its origins, history and those who helped shape it, mastering the fundamental principles underpinning it, studying its contemporary leaders of thought, and paying close attention to current trends and emerging themes.
Also very important is a critical awareness of the powers and limitations of your practice, like a trained warrior with their weapons. At the end of the day, not everybody will get a chance to develop a cure for cancer or save lives in their day jobs. Having this in mind keeps you humble and clear-eyed, preventing an overstated sense of self-importance which leads to hubris. Ultimately, the purpose of knowledge acquisition should be to hone the skills necessary for performing your job well, to adopt behaviours essential for success in that field, and to add value to yourself and other people.
For me, the quest for marketing knowledge eventually led to what I do today: working as a marketing consultant (and researcher), tutor and skills coach, helping to train marketing managers from diverse sectors across the UK. It is from this vantage point, more than anywhere else, that the case for formal marketing training in today’s world has become clearest to me.
According to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) and Hays Recruitment, nearly nine in ten UK marketing employers (88%) experienced skills shortages in the past year, and over half lack access to the skills they need for technologies including AI. Meanwhile, Marketing Week’s 2025 Career and Salary Survey found that more than 60% of marketers believe their organisations have a marketing effectiveness skills gap, making it the single biggest core skills concern in the industry. I’ve also seen the real-world consequences of this gap in the work I’ve done as consultant and tutor over the past decade in Africa and the UK.
Essentially, the argument for formal marketing education goes well beyond skill gaps, and it certainly goes beyond the AI topic that dominates so many industry conversations nowadays. Yes, AI is changing marketing significantly. Yes, over 70% of marketing professionals are already using AI in their roles. Yes, execution-level tasks like content production, reporting and basic campaign management are increasingly being absorbed by AI tools (even as AI-generated ‘Workslop’ grows). But framing marketing qualifications purely as a defensive response to automation misses the bigger point.
Marketing at its core, is a strategic management discipline. The CIM defines marketing as the management process of anticipating, identifying and satisfying customer needs profitably. That is a broad, complex, intellectually demanding mandate. And yet so many people in marketing roles operate with only a partial, often functional, view of what the job actually requires. Many are excellent at running ads or producing content or managing a CRM, but struggle to contribute meaningfully at the strategic level because they were never trained to think that way. This is a key structural gap in how marketing recruits and develops its people.
Formal training closes that gap. It provides the theoretical grounding, the principles and frameworks, the breadth of thinking that day-to-day work alone simply cannot give you. The CIM Level 6 curriculum and the UK Marketing Manager L6 Apprenticeship Standard, which underpin the modules I teach at Kent Business College, cover strategic marketing, brand management, integrated communications, customer behaviour, stakeholder management, marketing research and analytics, martech, AI, and more. More importantly for apprentices, the curriculum is not taught in isolation from the job, as apprentices get to apply their learning directly to real business challenges within their organisations. That combination of knowledge and practical skill application is what builds real marketing capability.
The marketing generalist, when properly trained, also becomes more commercially valuable. With AI handling an increasing share of specialist execution tasks, the marketer who understands a broad range of strategic functions and can coordinate human and machine (artificial) intelligence, becomes a more critical asset to a business. The Target Internet and CIM Digital Marketing Skills Benchmark, which analysed over 10,000 marketing professionals across 32 industries, found significant skills gaps in data analytics, digital strategy and content marketing; all areas that formal training directly addresses.
There is also a confidence argument. When you have rigorously studied marketing at a high level, you carry a different kind of authority into client meetings and boardrooms. You are not guessing or hoping your instincts are right when you have a professional foundation to stand on.
Most definitely, the tools will keep changing. The platforms will keep evolving. But the principles of marketing – what they are and why they matter – are far more durable than any single piece of technology. Formal qualifications teach you those principles. And in a profession that has always in the long-term rewarded strategic clarity over tactical noise, that matters now more than ever.
Leave a Reply