The American Marketing Association (AMA) is the essential community for marketers across career stages and industries. To extend its leadership in professional development, AMA partnered with Desklight to better understand learners’ evolving needs and build a strategy to guide future content development.
The Challenge
AMA sought to modernize its approach to learning by identifying the skills today’s marketers need most—and creating a structure that would support flexible, personalized learning experiences. The team needed a validated framework to prioritize content, engage subject matter experts, and make learning more accessible and strategic.
The Process
Desklight led a two-part initiative. First, we conducted stakeholder interviews with marketing leaders, academics, and practitioners to surface the most pressing skill gaps and learner needs. We developed a learner assessment tool to evaluate current competencies and guide future content decisions.
Second, we used these insights to develop a skills taxonomy and low-fidelity prototypes for a new learning hub. We tested these wireframes with prospective users to explore content preferences, badging, modality options, and ideal user flows.
Our contributions included:
- Prototype design and testing
- Stakeholder and user research
- Skills assessment tool design
- Learning taxonomy development
The Solution
AMA emerged with a validated skills framework for a marketing competency model covering six competency domains, a prioritized learning roadmap, and a clear understanding of how to better serve modern marketers. The new foundation allows AMA to align its offerings with learner needs, support more tailored pathways, and strengthen its role as the go-to source for professional marketing development.
