The Marketing Institute has designed ‘Marketer Pathways’, a competency framework developed specifically for the marketing profession.
The framework has been created to help marketing professionals and their employers to understand and together assess the capabilities required for both current and desired roles.
It is divided into three key streams, marketing, business and people and ultimately enables marketing professionals and their teams to identify where they are currently, where they would like to be and how to get there, through a personalised development plan.
All of our learning and development programmes align with the competencies within the framework, making clear to learners which ones are relevant to their personal development plans.
1. The Process Steps
3. The Competencies
In order to consider yourself an expert in marketing, you must also have a deep understanding of the wider world of work; a core knowledge in business and people matters, regardless of your role, sector or specialism, or business.
Business Competencies
As marketing professionals, it is critical that we understand our organisation – internally, its purpose, priorities and strategic direction, externally, the commercial context and trends that influence the internal factors. Practical business knowledge, planning, project management, change management and customer focus are some of the competencies addressed in this section. These business competencies will serve you throughout your career, regardless of role or level.
- Action & Results
- Change & Improvements
- Commercial Awareness
- Ethics & Integrity
- Decisions & Judgment
- Innovation
- Organisational Awareness
- Planning & Prioritisation
- Project Management
Marketer Competencies
This section focuses on Marketing specific competencies and indicative behaviours. At each level we describe the core areas of marketing specialisation from brand, channel, digital marketing and new product development.
At the early career stages, you can use this to explore areas of specialisation, at the latter career stages it will aid you in facilitate the development of your marketing team.
- Integrated Analytics
- Brand
- Marketing Capability
- Channel Management
- Corporate Communications
- Digital Marketing
- Marketing Campaigns
- New Product Development
- Marketing Strategy
- Research
- Customer Centricity
People Competencies
Collaborating, influencing, leading, communicating, negotiating: all activities that have people at the core. Focusing on the competencies highlighted in this section will give you a deep understanding of the range of people and leadership practices that you and your team will need to be effective. They are relevant to any role, in any industry.
Building on your people competencies will enable you to make an impact and develop capability in your team and across your organisation.
- Communications & Interpersonal Skills
- Conflict Management
- Developing People
- Influencing
- Leadership
- Managing People
- Negotiation Skills
- Relationship Management
- Resilience
- Team Building
Download the Competency Framework here
Other Business Topics
It is also beneficial to consider the broader business arena and the knowledge needed in order to progress and achieve success. It is important to have a solid understanding of the general principles and best practices of the areas listed below. Spending time in another function or undertaking general training in another area are good ways to broaden your general business knowledge.
- Governance & Compliance
- Risk Management
- Sales / Business Development
- Finance
- Human Resources
- Information Technology
- Operations
- Procurement
5. Development Planning
- Defining and planning the development actions that could accelerate development towards a new role.
- Identify the key experiences that will help the future move.
6. Career Conversations
Career Conversations provide the opportunity to have a quality conversation between employee and manager.
7. The Act and Achieve Checklist
The Act and Achieve checklist
REVIEW – During this first stage time should be taken to reflect and plan.
- Review the Career Stages chart and try to plot your current stage
- Review the Competency Framework to understand the structure of the model
- Follow the GROW model and answer the questions honestly and critically
ASSESS – this second stage allows you assess your current strengths and development needs
- Using the Career Stages sheet aim to target your next move or final ambition
- Using the Competency Framework select the competencies you’ll need to develop
- Using the example Role Profiles to help identify the competencies and learning experiences that you will need and that you will develop
PLAN – here you will start to make plans to close gaps or develop in areas identified
- Here you will complete the Development Plan template
- Using the 70:20:10 model you will be able to build the development actions in a structured way focussing on:
- Who can help you, with Mentoring or Career Conversations
- What Learning experiences you’ll need “on the job”. Typical Learning Experiences are highlighted on the Role Profiles
ACT – now you need to act on the development items
- Checklist to help you stay on track ( timelines, someone to keep you accountable, etc)
ACHIEVE – get ready for success
- Checklist , Go back to review step, check against grow model etc…..
Our thanks to MII members from the following companies
