The American Marketing Association is a leading professional association for marketers across career stages and industries. AMA partnered with Desklight to understand how the profession was changing and use those insights to shape the future of its learning offerings.
The Challenge
Marketing was evolving quickly, and AMA needed a clearer understanding of the capabilities marketers needed to succeed.
The opportunity was bigger than developing new content. AMA needed a research grounded framework for identifying critical skills, understanding learner needs, and making strategic decisions about what learning experiences to build next.
What We Uncovered
Marketers needed different skills at different moments in their careers, making a single learning pathway insufficient.
Our research revealed an opportunity to organize learning around a clear set of competencies while giving marketers more flexibility to identify their own skill gaps and pursue learning relevant to their goals.
How We Worked
Desklight conducted research with marketing leaders, academics, practitioners, and prospective learners to understand emerging skill needs and how marketers wanted to learn.
We translated those insights into a skills taxonomy, developed an assessment approach to help marketers understand their capabilities, and created prototypes for how learning could be organized and experienced.
We then tested those concepts with users, using their feedback to refine the competency framework and inform AMA’s broader learning strategy.
What Changed
AMA emerged with a validated marketing competency model spanning six competency domains, along with a clearer roadmap for developing learning around the needs of modern marketers.
The work gave AMA a strategic foundation for assessing skills, prioritizing content, creating more personalized learning pathways, and evolving its professional development offerings over time.
Capabilities
Design Research • Insight Synthesis • Learning Strategy • Competency Modeling • Prototyping • User Testing
