In a post-digital world we should finally wave a fond farewell to all the specialist courses and training programmes in digital marketing. Sure, there is room for technical skills at the lower end of the training totem pole but the idea that you need to be trained separately in digital marketing should disappear in the near future.

I’ve endured my fair share of these courses over the years. They inevitably start by declaring marketing to be effectively dead or outdated, then re-present the classic marketing syllabus with some digital examples to illustrate how everything has now totally changed. It’s not segmentation any more, oh no, its digital segmentation and here is an example using mobile phone companies to illustrate the point.

Ideally, marketing training will re-surface as an essential input in any marketer’s career path. That sentence should not present itself as radical but unfortunately it almost certainly is. A majority of marketers still believe that training in their craft is a non-essential element in their abilities and one of the prime reasons for that ignorance has been a preference for overtly tactical, second-rate courses in digital marketing.

That said, there should be a renewed pressure on those designing and offering marketing training and degrees to ensure that the syllabus is updated to the post digital age. Separate courses in digital marketing are likely to go the same way as degrees in international marketing. But we must, must, must update the content of marketing degrees to ensure integrated marketing communications is not TV, radio and ‘internet marketing’, a la 1995.

Most marketing undergraduates will take 10 years to make their first strategic decisions – when they start out in the business they are engaged in exclusively tactical occupation. While it’s important we arm them for their strategic careers down the track, it’s essential we give them the up-to-date insights in campaign building.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.marketingweek.com