What training is critical for advertising agency staff?

Training is critical in any agency, particularly to show the team that the agency is continuing to invest in their learning and development. It doesn’t need to be expensive or third-party training. It can be regular internal training about topics of relevance. There are so many specialists within an advertising agency that you can utilise their skills and get them to volunteer. Agencies think about training, but not many actually dedicate the time to do it

We are starting to put together 20:20 training for all staff within Mark and trying to identify common themes/topics that people want to know about. The reason for 20:20 is it will be twenty topics in twenty minutes, very informal and sometimes without a presentation and just a whiteboard to share notes and do the training.

Everyone in the agency has been asked to prioritise the top three things they want to know more about. It is a great experiment because it shows where people really think they are lacking and need help. The most common themes coming out are around the:

• Direction of the company (where to in the next 6mths, 12mths and 24mths)
• Expectations of staff (how do they do their role better and their KPIs)
• Account service/building better relationships with clients.

Some of the areas I noticed that people need more help with are:

1. Account service gold standards (managing the client, expectations and relationship building)
2. Financial management 101 (why timesheets are important, forecasting and how to ask the client for money)
3. KPIs for the agencies, management and yourself (this will provide an overview of the agency direction, but also give indepth details for how everyone in the agency can/must help to get there)

There are many other topics that should be considered (such as specific digital, direct and data discipline training) but for the main part we need to get the basics right. The basics are agency direction, clients and finance because they are the agency foundations.

What training do other agencies offer?

When I was at Wunderman, they had a global eLearning site offering over 250 courses where any full-time employee could log in and complete them at their own speed. They covered a range of business topics were varying lengths and for different levels of experience.

To make this a success there was someone owning and driving training in each country (usually the HR managers).

Written by Dominique Hind