Do You Really Need SQL?

From my experience, OMCPs are hired quickly. Very quickly. But one exception caught my attention last year. This OMCP was articulate, well educated, and had enough experience in one field to make a diagonal jump into digital analytics. In fact, this OMCP took initiative and volunteered to perform analytics reporting for a charity to further boost his analytics experience claims. I thought it was perfect.

But it wasn't.

The candidate called OMCP to let us know that SQL programming wasn't covered in the OMCP standard, yet it was on almost every job description for analytics roles. We took that very seriously. More than 4,000 managers tell us what they need candidates to know and show the priority of each practice. SQL wasn't on the analytics list. Yet, sure enough, we confirmed it was on many analytics job postings. When we polled our community and managers and asked, “Do you really require SQL?” the answer was stunning. “Not really. We just put it on the job description as a filter.”

A filter?

So I asked, “Do you realize how many candidates you may be missing who know digital analytics but haven't learned SQL?” The responses were all over the map. Some removed from the job posting; some kept it. The point is that candidates cannot know for certain which job posting requirements are must‐haves and which are filters (you'll learn more about why filters are there later in this chapter).

The same can apply to filtering on specific tools. On a recent online meetup with digital marketing agency owners, the conversation quickly went, as it often does, to the lack of hirable candidates. I asked, “How do you filter?” and most agreed that they post or filter for specific tool knowledge, e.g., SEMrush or Adobe Analytics, as these suggest that the candidate has experience in the practice.

The problem is that some candidates will back away from applying if they lack experience in those specific tools. Once again, employers miss out on good candidates by using an inaccurate filter. While this may sound dismal, it is intended to be enlightening to the candidate. When you have a picture of what's going on behind the job description, this can help you tune your message for each hiring manager.

Finding the Right Match

Reading job descriptions can be discouraging when the requirements seem unreasonable or even impossible. How do we decipher what the real requirements are? Here are two recommendations to increase your chances of finding a match.

• When you match roughly 80 percent of the hard skills listed on a job description, you are probably okay to apply. This can be disputed for as long as people have opinions, but it's a guideline to start with.
• Next, and even more important, it's time to get into the heads of the hiring managers.

If you're reading this, you are a marketer, or on your way to becoming one. So it's time to treat your career like a marketing campaign. To do that, we must understand our target market, which in this case includes hiring managers or potential clients. One way to understand our target market is to uncover the scenes, wants, and knowledge needed to persuade our prospects.

Answer these: What is the scene where a manager must hire for digital marketing talent? What do they really want? And what knowledge do they need to make a decision?

First let's immerse ourselves into a scene of a hiring manager. Here is a pretty common, albeit slightly dramatized example:

• The hiring team is short on staff and full on deadlines, wading through internal hiring requirements and with little time to interview, let alone write a clear job description in one pass. Sometimes an "everything and the kitchen sink" job description goes out. Sometimes a template is all the human resources team will allow. The posting goes out on the job boards.
• The hiring team is flooded with the initial wave of “spray and pray” resumes ranging from interior designers to senior managers in retail to those who studied some marketing in school.
• The managers wanted to know, early in the process, if candidates are exaggerating a skill or underselling themselves. It's too hard to know with so many resumes coming in, so a meeting is held with the recruiting team.
• Now the recruiters and/or the applicant tracking system (ATS) are instructed to reject any candidates who don't claim 5 years of experience or a prior title with specific keywords. Nonetheless, the team is still flooded with resumes, most unqualified. Another meeting is held and now the ATS is set to filter resumes by skill keywords. But this has problems as well. The recruiting team, or ATS, have been looking for “web analytics” experience and overlooked “digital analytics” experience. They also filtered for CRO but missed resumes that mentioned conversion rate optimization.
• Nonetheless, some resumes get through the filters, and some interviews are set. After the first few interviews, the hiring team starts to get a picture of what talent is out there and what might work for the role that differs from the initial needs. So requirements change, but the posted job description doesn't get updated. Applicants are still seeing the old job description.
• There is no time to interview everyone. A hiring decision is made on a hunch. It doesn't work out, and even more time is lost, as well as costs, and company reputation when the new hire is dismissed weeks into the role. Then managers must start all over again, with an even stronger bias against what caused the prior hire to fail.

Sometimes the hiring process isn't the well‐oiled machine that the world imagines! How can the hiring team know, early in the process, if candidates are exaggerating a skill or underselling themselves? Some hiring managers resort to filtering on "years of experience," which they believe correlates with skills in the practice. Others filter based on tool names or phrases that suggest expertise in the practice. This isn't ideal or fair in all cases. In fact, I chuckle when I see required experience years exceeding the years the practice has been known to the industry! But the resumes that come through the "higher‐experience" filter do tend to correlate with established skills. Knowing this can give you, the candidate, some edge in addressing the pain of the hiring team. For example, you may format your resume to indicate total years of marketing experience instead of role by role.

And yes, more and more managers are turning toward skills tests or proof of industry certifications to establish levels of hard skills early in the interview process. So if you've already earned your OMCA or OMCP, you're ahead of the game.

Now that we have a scene, let's establish the “wants.”

To a marketer, complaints are more informative than compliments. To solve a problem, we look for pain or complaints and use the words of the customer to shape our product and message as well as the "knowledge" they need to make a decision. It's no different in marketing yourself for a job in digital marketing.

So how do we get those complaints? We could survey hiring managers, but managers aren't often accessible to candidates. And I can help here. It turns out that OMCP must survey and/or interview hiring managers in the digital marketing industry. Hundreds of them. And in my role at OMCP, I get to participate in this, interviewing hiring managers year round. Honestly, their answers are so consistent, I have to stop myself from silently mouthing the words as they say them. (My wife told me doing this is rude.)

And here they are. The top complaints of hiring managers, specifically in digital marketing are, roughly in order:

• Can't find qualified digital marketing candidates
• Candidates exaggerate skills
• Not a fit for the team
• Work habits lacking
• Invested in them and they left (Mayson 2019)

So with those complaints, let's list the most likely “wants” or “wants to avoid” of a hiring manager as it relates to deciding on whom to interview.

• Wants to avoid: Loss of time interviewing unqualified candidates
• Wants to avoid: Loss of reputation and time/resources when making a hiring mistake
• Wants to: Verify soft skills, work habits, or fit for team after hard skills are established

Can you think of others?

Now, let's establish what “knowledge” we as candidates need to provide to resolve the hiring team's “wants.”

The hiring manager and recruiting team must know and, ideally, verify the qualifications of the candidate, as much as possible ahead of time. Why? Because person‐to‐person interview time is precious, and the limited amount available can only go to the top handful of qualified applicants. With that, we can predict that the hiring manager will value the following:

• Resumes or online profiles containing keywords for skills, tools, or certifications
• Resumes or online profiles containing position titles or minimum years of experience
• Personas who share domain knowledge under some amount of peer review

Are you starting to see a path here?

Now, let's shape our product and messaging to address these wants and, as much as we are able, provide the knowledge the hiring teams are most likely to need through the vehicles most likely to get you that interview.

Choosing Apt Words and Phrases in Your Resume, CV, or Profile

Like it or not, your resume (or CV) or online profile is often the front runner in establishing a likely match for busy employers. If you don't clear that hurdle, then it's unlikely that you'll win a person‐to‐person conversation.

Your goal is to portray your product (you, your online profile, and your resume!) accurately and in an easily accessible way. I don't condone keyword stuffing to game the system, but it is a good practice to select phrases that will most likely match what the hiring managers will be looking for and work these fluidly into your resume and cover letter.

Hints for this can come from the job postings and from the hiring manager's social streams. Scan past and recent job postings for phrases and words used to describe skills. If it is too difficult to pinpoint the hiring manager's name through online searches, pick the most likely three and search their posts on social streams like LinkedIn or Twitter to look for keyword usage in the context of the work they do. These are the most likely keywords to be used as filters. While you may specialize in digital analytics, the hiring team may use a tool name, “Adobe analytics,” as an indicator of this skill. The hiring team may also use the phrase “web analytics” instead of “digital analytics.” These are your hints.

If you see consistent trends, then it's time to work these keywords and phrases into your profile. The key here is to do it fluidly and not in eye‐straining tiny fonts and long bulleted lists. Using the previous example, if the job posting lists “web analytics” as a required skill, then change at least one of your experience or skill statements to use “web analytics” instead of “digital analytics.” So, for example, “At Mondelēz, I lead two initiatives to implement web analytics data collection that brought us into compliance with GDPR requirements.”

Getting the Most from Your Work and Platform Experience

As mentioned, some hiring managers filter for qualified candidates using tool or platform names as a substitute for the related experience. So the presence of a phrase like “Google Ads” might signal experience in digital advertising while the keyword “HubSpot” might signify marketing automation.

To avoid long keyword lists, one method to improve your presentation is to roll popular platform names in with your narrative, “…increasing conversion by 23 percent deploying marketing automation through HubSpot.” Or if the likely filter is Google Analytics, then you could list your Simplilearn course experience as “…completed 26 hours of accredited digital analytics training that covered Google Analytics and Data Studio reporting tools.” See how that works? We're being accurate and are more likely to get our resume through the system.

If you are missing that experience, you may be able to volunteer for nonprofits who use such platforms. Six months of managing email marketing to a charity can put the right words and platforms in your profile. And you're helping a charity.

Another technique to handle the experience filter is to format your resume to indicate total years of marketing experience instead of role by role. So instead of listing employment for each company, you could list, “Web analytics practitioner, three years, 2019–2022” to summarize your experience in web analytics across multiple projects or roles. Don't stretch the truth. Be sure that you can back up all claims.

Your goal is to be noticed for that search whether it's your resume or your online profile.

Does this suggest creating custom resumes for each role? Yes! Absolutely. Does this suggest changing your online profiles to match your top job application? Yes again. Some successful job seekers modify their LinkedIn profiles each week to match the most important application of the week. Your social platforms have other ways to support your search, and that's by sharing your knowledge no matter where you are in your learning experience.

Standing Out by Giving Back

Managers are learning that digital marketers who consistently share expertise under the bright lights of peer review are more likely to have the required skills. And I heartily agree.

This one piece of advice brings the most benefit, but also gets the most pushback from candidates. And understandably so. Fear of revealing ignorance, stage fright, struggling with writing, and other hesitations are common. But a career in digital marketing could be challenging without overcoming these very hesitations. You'll see in the soft skills section ahead that hiring managers are looking for persuasion skills, the ability to present, and the ability to write. What better way to showcase these essential skills than by sharing your expertise with others?

Sharing your expertise online, or in person, has several additional benefits:

• Sharing, in most forms, forces you to structure your processes and thoughts.
• Sharing invites constructive criticism from your colleagues and community.
• Sharing showcases your knowledge and helps hiring managers and clients find you and get an idea of your capabilities.
• Sharing can also create some “celebrity” effect, making you a preferred catch for a hiring team or client.

The venerable Bruce Clay sat opposite me at a memorable speaker's dinner after a digital marketing conference. We were taking a moment to look back at meaningful decisions in our careers. Bruce pointed out that very early in his career, he decided to share everything he learned—all his SEO expertise—no matter how “special” or “secret” the method was at the time. Bruce's practice grew into one of the most prominent digital marketing agencies in the industry and if you asked him, he'd tell you that sharing his expertise openly was a cornerstone of that growth. People hire who they learn from, who they understand.

“But I can't share anything authoritative yet,” says the newly graduated. It may be true that you won't come out of the gate as the next Bill Slawski, but you can find a way to convey the basics that you have learned in a new and interesting way. Matt Bailey once taught basic web analytics concepts by mapping the process to patterns in Star Trek episodes. It was a hit. You can curate information and present it in a channel that others will value. Why not interview some of your fellow OMCP and OMCA certified and collate their wisdom? Ask questions in those interviews (live or in online forums) that tease out new insights valuable to others. Your role as a marketer will require this type of thinking, so for the astute hiring manager, these signs make you stand out from the crowd.

In the soft skills section ahead, you'll learn what else hiring managers are looking for, and hopefully start to see the connection between sharing your expertise and persuading others.

Ability to Persuade, Ability to Write

We combine these two as they are close cousins.

There are several interpretations of what these requirements mean that depend on the role and the size of the organization. The smaller the organization, the greater the hours spent on persuading the target market. The larger the organization, the greater the ratio of hours spent persuading internal stakeholders.

One hiring manager at a leading consumer products company told me, “I look for candidates who dance, play music, or perform in their off hours. They are more likely to be able to present. I can trust that when I put them in front of an executive, they will be able to present well.”

So managers and clients are looking for signs of your ability to persuade a target market, whether it's via advertising, media, press, affiliates, community management, written content, or the talent to recruit and manage those who do these jobs.

There are really only three channels commonly used to confirm these: an in‐person interview, testimony to your prior work in these areas, or a cursory scan of your online presence.

To stand out here, there are four to‐dos:

• Clean up your online presence, profiles, and posts to showcase your persuasion abilities and your ability to write. No need to change your profile to Shakespearian prose. If you write informally, then be consistent. It's up to you if you choose to keep or eliminate content that could offend the hiring manager or be at odds with the values of the organization. If they'd criticize or avoid you because of who you are, then you may not be comfortable in a role on that team. Conversely, there is a time and a place for everything. Even though in the United States it isn't proper for a hiring manager to scan what you intended for private use, most admit to looking anyway. If those videos of your drunken pool party are less important than attaining your new role, it could be time to mark those as private and keep public what enhances your personal brand.
• For managers who haven't heard of you through your history of sharing and don't look at your online presence, your primary showcase of your ability to persuade will be your resume and cover letter. Some managers prefer long‐form passionate cover letters, and some value brevity. Either way, most guides will encourage you to use the cover letter to show your passion for the company and the role (which you researched, of course) and quantify relevant work habits and soft skills that are not already covered in the resume. Perhaps the hiring manager will look at your cover letter in the context of an internal briefing. Would it stand up to scrutiny as error free and fact rich? Would it persuade the executive team? If yes, then you can check this box.
• Impeccable grammar will impress many managers. Use a reputable tool and have someone check your writing.
• When you do get an interview, prepare, prepare, prepare. The hiring team will rightly want to verify that you have a history of persuading others as well as additional soft skills and work habits. Anticipate the types of questions covered in the next section. Though they may not ever come up, you'll be ready to steer the conversation toward highlighting your skills and habits.

Ability to Turn Data into Decisions, Strategy into Tactics

We combine these as they are both action related. When have you turned strategic initiatives into actionable steps? When have you taken a table of data and made decisions from it? It turns out that hiring managers want to verify that you have done this and are likely to do it well in your digital marketing role. Be prepared to steer the conversation to examples where you exhibited these habits or if the hiring manager asks, you'll have some stories to tell. Here are some example questions in each category.

Questions that can test your ability to turn data into decisions:

• Tell me about a time when you turned data into decisions.
• The AB test data is inconclusive, roughly 50/50. What do we do next?
• The majority of site visitors exit after searching for shipping options. What is the next action?
• Our survey data indicate that our prospects want a free demo, which is too expensive. What is the next step?

Questions that can test your ability to break strategies down into tactical actions:

• Tell us about a time when you created tactics from a strategy.
• Our strategy is to dominate the luxury market first and then move our name into the mass market. What content marketing models will achieve this?
• We will empower the community to spread the word about our products. What are the first three steps to curate and build that community?
• Our email campaigns will be the core of our conversations with our market. They should be inspiring, educational, and entertaining whether our prospects buy or not. What are the steps to build a list?

The chances you'll be asked these exact questions are very low. But a trial run through these will help bring to front‐of‐mind the answers and stories that are likely to align with the needs and wants of the hiring manager.

Traditional Marketing Skills

There is an iconic scene in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Our hero, Indiana Jones, is stopped in a Cairo marketplace during a chase and confronted by what appears to be an expert swordsman. The swordsman laughs and brandishes his weapon to intimidate Indy who, so far, has been using hand‐to‐hand techniques. The crowd backs away, prepared for an epic sword fight. But Indy doesn't have time for this. He thinks for a moment and surprises everyone by simply using a gun to end the fight.

As digital marketers, we are not exempt from knowing basic marketing principles and concepts such as market definition, unique selling points, clear definitions of benefits to our audience, and when needed, magazine, catalog, print, outdoor, radio, direct mail, or event marketing. Much of what underpinned marketing in the 20th century still works today, and hiring managers will avoid those who don't know it.

Your takeaway? Know your Ogilvy and Godin. Study the marketing strategies of Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, and John Brinkley. Does the hiring manager “like” or “follow” a well‐known marketing author? How much can it hurt to study up on those marketing methods?

People Skills

If it isn't obvious so far, a digital marketer can rarely work in a vacuum. Technical SEOs must convey concepts and value to managers and colleagues. PPC managers must present results and earn support for new initiatives. Analytics specialists must extract business goals from busy managers and then convey meaningful reports that drive action.

It's not enough to be good at implementing your channel expertise. Your digital channels affect many stakeholders and service providers, and you must influence and persuade them all. Executives may not understand the channel or requirements or even the potential. To convey these effectively without hyperbole or drama can earn you a reputation and the relationships needed to make your digital channels effective.

Being right isn't enough. I once joined a marketing team at an EMC/Dell division only to be aghast at the site load times, deletion of pages (with no redirect) that had thousands of valuable inbound links, landing pages without conversion tracking, and key content in PDF or uncrawlable forms. In my second week, the execs were asking why we weren't ranking number 1 already. When laying out these inhibitors along with paths to rectification, my strident tone caused some upheaval, and I unintentionally insulted a lot of people. I was right (of course!), but I wasn't getting the changes implemented. A wise middle manager took the challenge and coached me on how to come alongside the stakeholders better and help them move toward solutions. After experiencing this, it's even more impressive to see how other in‐house digital marketers build relationships, friendships, and trust by knowing their audience and dispensing just enough information to help the team succeed as a whole.

If you have intrinsic “people skills,” you'll know it if others naturally want to join you in projects, if your colleagues repeatedly include you in their decision‐making process. Was this the case in your last job or school experience? If you don't know if you have people skills, then it's likely you'll need to do some practice runs, perhaps starting in your community or by volunteering to help a nonprofit organization or charity with their marketing. Some candidates will benefit from courses on “soft skills” or a reputable book covering these principles.

Preparing for Interview Questions About Soft Skills

Hiring managers have a tough time identifying and verifying soft skills and work habits. Unfortunately, some trust their gut, a hunch, or a feeling. Others will try to derive this from specific questions in the interview. The most common interview questions for verifying soft skills start with “Tell me about a time when you….” The interviewer is looking for stories that portray your situation, tactics, actions, and results related to the particular soft skill requirement. “Tell me about a time when you influenced others.” The prepared candidate will have stories at hand. The best answers to these questions start with “There was this one time at _____ company….” The prepared candidate will not resort to generalist statements, such as the cringe worthy, “Influencing others is an important skill and I'm very good at it. Really I am.”

If you, the candidate, after multiple tries, cannot come up with one story related to a required soft skill or habit, then it is much less likely that the interviewer will perceive that you have that skill. There are exceptions, and a well‐trained interviewer will detect distress or simple memory lapses and come back to the question later in the interview.

In preparation for a live interview, scan the job description for hints on the soft skills the hiring team is looking for. The requirement to “multitask” can be translated into “the ability to prioritize.” “Team player” can be translated into the need for persuasion skills. Make a list of up to five of the most prominent and jot down stories where you showed these skills. It may not come up at all, but you'll be ready to speak to the required skills whether asked or not.

Top Five Complaints from Hiring Managers

1. Can't find qualified digital marketing candidates
2. Candidates exaggerate skills
3. Not a fit for the team
4. Work habits lacking
5. Invested in them and they left (Mayson 2019)

A perfect summary is the phrase, “The talent pool is too shallow.” And when we look at the interview process, the job description, and the recruiting efforts, it sheds some light on that perfect description, “shallow.”

Over the last decade I've had the privilege of working with dozens of the world's leading marketing teams, large and small, agency or in‐house, to set competencies and requirements to increase talent. It's a unique perspective, and like that famous insurance commercial, “I've seen a thing or two.” So in this section, I'll share ways to develop the most qualified talent when you can hire, ways to scale your team's performance when you can't hire, and what worked (and didn't work) for teams working to deepen the talent pool.

Developing Deeper Talent Pools

A deeper talent pool means that you have digital marketing talent available when you need it. Some less experienced managers assume this is only on the hiring side. But it turns out that there are three core elements that consistently underpin the scaling of a talented digital marketing team. We will call them:

Team PerformanceCandidate Qualification Finding Talent

You might ask, “Aren't those backward?” Well, yes, they appear to be at first, and we will get to the hiring side in upcoming pages. But for now, it turns out that one piece of information, one answer, is key to support all three elements: finding talent, qualification, and scaling performance. All three are substantively dependent on your answer to a simple question:

How well can you define and measure what your team DOES?

Quick. You're on an elevator, and someone asks you: What is it that your digital marketing team does and how do you know if it is successful? What's your answer? Can you say it out loud right now in a few sentences?

If we know what our outcomes are, we know what to measure. If we know what to measure, we all know that what gets measured, gets done. And this applies to marketing campaigns as well as scaling the talent of our team. Let's start with what to measure.

Completing Your Competency Document  For each practice area, define the actions that a person in that role must take to achieve success. These are “primary competencies,” and it's a good practice to start each one with an action (identify, describe, perform, structure, build), or even better, to use Bloom's Taxonomy verbs that match the level of the role, as shown in Figure 10.1.

The next indent, the “First Detail” is a list of possibilities. Usually only a subset of the list of first details, e.g., 4 of 10 listed, is actually used in training, performance reviews, interviewing, or testing. Lastly, we set ratios to know where to put priority. Ratios can be established by polling existing staff to allocate hours to each practice in a given work cycle.

Primary competencies are perfect to establish training and reviews. The first detail level is great for writing skills tests.

In the excerpt in Figure 10.2, we expand two of the digital advertising practice areas to include primary competencies with a first detail list.

Now we have a document that can guide the requirements for each phase of the team and talent scaling process.

Now we know what to measure. Let's apply it to scaling the teams with this process:

• Test for what's missing.
• Train to weaknesses.
  • Use the competency guide to make in‐house training or vet accredited programs.
• Annual readiness testing (e.g., Facebook Blueprint, OMCA, Google Ads).
• Celebrate certifications and completions.

Bias Can Cost You 15 Percent to 35 Percent in Performance  If you had interviewed with me 10 years ago at one of my companies, there's a much higher chance you'd be hired if you showed interest in vintage motorcycles. This can be called an “affinity” bias or a “halo” bias. Now that I'm aware of the bias, this won't work quite as well (so don't tweet that), but do tweet that your interview biases (and you do have them) can correlate with 35 percent lower performance than teams that reduce bias and build highly diverse teams. This is data from the McKinsey 2015 report entitled “Diversity Matters: 15–35 percent performance (EBIT, revenue and ROE) correlations with team gender diversity and ethnic diversity.”

Don't think your interview process has bias? Freeform interviews and “gut” decisions trend toward bias. Profiling by name, location, school, or even speech patterns can contribute to bias.

The antidote is structured interviews. To create a structured interview process and save considerable time for your managers and staff, managers can verify hard skills in advance, and gradually increase live time based on those who progress through the steps. See Figure 10.3.

The best practice: verify hard skills through blind testing or by proof of industry certification. Instead of resume Bingo, you will only invest interview time with candidates who have proven hard skills. It is very hard to “exaggerate skills” when taking a proctored industry exam!

• True story: For research, I've been known to go through some interview processes myself. I once applied to a company who wisely did testing up front. The exam rules stated, “No calculator, no assistance.” Well of course I used both. The next morning, the recruiter gave a cheery welcome and announced that I'd be taking the same test, proctored by her right then and there. I was caught; and not only did the hiring company see my true hard skills, they could also derive how likely it was that I cheated on the first exam.

I don't recommend this exact process for testing your candidates! But it illustrates the point that high‐stakes exams can filter candidates before a hiring manager invests the time to interview. Also, online proctored exams are becoming easier and less expensive every year. Do be careful to respect the time of the candidates. There is a fine balance between demanding too much up‐front time from candidates and filtering for those essential skills. A well‐written exam, vetted with item P‐values and item discrimination analysis, can do this much more quickly than an exam that lacks these verifications.

You now know how to write your own exam. If you'd rather not do that, you can purchase OMCP and OMCA exams to test candidates and staff. In all cases, be up front about the time investment for candidates. “This interview will require a 20‐minute exam to verify digital marketing hard skills or proof of existing OMCA or OMCP certification.”

Scaling and Staying Together

Retaining and developing internal talent is less expensive than hiring new talent, with very few exceptions. One manager commented last week that salaries are skyrocketing so fast that he must increase incumbent salaries when hiring new talent for just short of double last year's salaries.

Yes, you can pay to develop skills and then see some employees leave, but the benefits are proven to outweigh the costs. Only short‐sighted managers teach internal processes and are perceived to fear employee defection. Strategic managers empower the employee to develop transferable career strength.

Which do you think an employee will value more: an internal certificate of completion of XYZ methods course signed by you, or an internationally recognized industry certification valued by many employers?

Here are just a few best practices I've seen after helping hundreds of teams improve digital marketing talent:

• Pick approved courses and certifications in advance and send out the list. Those who teach to your competency document are a great start. In fact, it saves you hours of evaluation time when you simply send your competency document to a training firm and let them do the work to prove to you that they teach to your standards. Either award a training budget for expense reimbursement program to each employee for approved courses, purchase access for the team, or even better, use gated entitlement (see next).
• Create a group goal that is celebrated at the highest levels. For example, the CEO will publicly congratulate the first 10 who attain OMCP certification by name. This broadcasts to the company and the outside world that you invest in your employees. It sets a goal for internal staff to achieve the same level.
• Treat your staff like adults. Instead of forcing everyone through the same hours of courses, use a passing score on an exam as the goal. For example, those who can pass an industry standard OMCA exam get celebrated and get back to work, with the option to attempt an OMCP‐level exam. Those who cannot pass the initial readiness testing will value the company‐funded training even more as they work to earn an industry certification.
• Use gated entitlement to save hours and costs. With OMCP, the following processes consistently yield the best results. You might use these four steps for other standards, training, and certifications:
  • Evangelize the program 1 month in advance or more, with C‐level support.
  • Everyone starts with the same readiness assessment (in this example, the OMCA practice assessment), due in 2 weeks, celebrating completion.
  • Training access is available to those who score 69 percent or less, and certification exam vouchers are awarded to those who score 70 percent or higher.
  • Celebrate those who earn certification (OMCA in this case) and offer them support for advanced training or higher level certification, e.g., OMCP.
• Friendly competition among teams for progress through training, tests or final certification yields great results. “Lunch and learns” where staff discuss the training or techniques for passing the exams build unity. We've seen bonuses to staff who create short how‐to videos to help others follow.

These are examples, but the overall spirit of investment in your team's skills goes beyond performance and retention. It helps you scale for far less than it costs to recruit and hire new talent.

Need to scale momentarily? Your cross‐trained employees can stand in if needed. Some managers tap former employees to fill temporary workloads. How can they do that? By investing in people and relationships.

At Market Motive, I regularly invited our interns into my conference rooms when I spoke with my attorneys about patents or with my co‐founders about budgets. Where else will they get this type of education? It cost me little but helped them with their career paths. When we could not pay our developers what the Silicon Valley giants were paying, we'd help them navigate to the best new job possible.

Do the same. Invest in your employees' lives by funding personal development that empowers them to move beyond their current role, whether it's with you or not. It's personally rewarding and business wise; it pays back multifold. Your reputation as an employer will improve. Your relationship with local educators will be stellar and attract better talent. Former employees will remember you well, and send business, talent, and help when you need it. Your own talent pool will grow because your loyal staff will perform better, bringing in new methods and skills that increase your overall performance.