The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) has called upon businesses across Wales to assess their marketing capabilities, after a major industry report highlighted a lack of skills as one of the biggest challenges facing many organisations today.

In 2017, CIM’s ‘State of the Industry’ report found that while marketers are excited about getting more involved in strategic vision for the company (63%) and driving change within the organisation (61%), nearly all (93%) think that the marketing skills gap at strategic level was a concern for many businesses.

CIM has launched an online diagnostic portal to allow businesses to effectively assess professional marketing capabilities across teams and departments. This will help organisations make more efficient training and development decisions.

CIM’s Marketing Analysis Portal (MAP) is available for organisations as an additional analytical component of its well-established consultant-led learning and development capability assessment service. The new portal will help organisations to fully understand their capability gaps against their aspirations, as well as empowering marketing managers to make informed decisions on the critical training and development needs of their team.

MAP, which is based on CIM’s Professional Marketing Competencies, offers marketing professionals the opportunity to identify strengths and gaps across either the full range of disciplines or specific areas based on existing structures. CIM supports organisations in interpreting the output in order to build relevant solutions to support individual and organisational development.

CIM’s learning and development discovery services combine the Marketing Analysis Portal (MAP) with consultant-led investigation to provide:

• Insight into capability gaps
• Inconsistencies across teams
• Understanding misalignment to strategy
• Recommended solutions

Sameer Rahman, Wales Chair of CIM, said:

“When identifying marketing capabilities within your organisation, our Marketing Analysis Portal will allow businesses across Wales to directly identify individuals’ needs and highlight trends across their organisation.

“We believe that developing the marketing team capability is an essential part of driving performance, MAP will enable businesses to invest in their marketing capability with confidence.”

To find out more about MAP and CIM’s Company Training Services, visit: www.cim.co.uk/map

Or to find out how CIM can help you develop the capability of your marketing team call: +44 (0)1628 427250