ESOMAR Congress III – New Skills, New Training
September 19 2007
At the second day of the ESOMAR Congress in Berlin, two UK research veterans talked about the changing skill sets and training needs of research professionals. David Smith predicted a boom in online learning; while Phyllis MacFarlane gave some ideas about new ways of training graduates.
In 'Finding and developing new talent', David Smith of DVL Smith Group and Mario van Hammersveld of van Hammersveld MC, Netherlands, discussed the new skill set needed by a new generation of researchers, summarising it in terms of seven attributes or types. A good researcher will need to be:
- an information integrator
- able to contextualise knowledge
- an insight detective
- an impact assessor
- a corporate storyteller
- able to frame choices for business, and
- a marketing implementor.
To an extent, many of these seem to us to be variations on old themes, or old skills that
good researchers have always had, but Smith also summarised the dramatic changes he foresees in learning techniques. With technology 'flattening' variations around the globe, online learning offers enormous potential, but our industry, Smith suggests, has 'failed to make concrete breakthroughs in designing practical training programmes to disseminate this new approach throughout the world'.
Smith said young researchers would increasingly learn from podcasts, vidcasts and e-tutorials, face-to-face but online, using applications including expert systems and discussion forums. Market forces will carry this forward - but they should be aided and abetted by a central initiative to produce standardised training for the industry. Smith made the suggestion that ESOMAR could take the lead on the latter. More specifically, a leading academic / practitioner could be commissioned to prepare the core curriculum; e-training experts should convert this material into modules to be delivered in an online format; and a book should be published detailing 'a high profile market research success story - explaining how, in using the above skills, we are now making a creative contribution to business decision-making.'
In 'Training the Next Generation - It's MR but not as We Know It' (two different series of Star Trek in one title - kudos),
GfK NOP's Mike Cooke & Phyllis MacFarlane discussed a radical new approach to training graduates taken by the company in 2006, and the lessons learnt from it.
The company takes in about 20 graduates a year, and has traditionally put them through an induction programme 'immersing them in the science' of research - but had begun to feel that this was 'a bit of a sheep dip'. Recognising that MR was changing, and that like other large agencies it was not always retaining the junior staff into whom it was investing so much, the firm set out to develop a new set of research skills appropriate to 'the conceptual age', and decided to 'let go' of the training programme.
By the sound of it, the firm may have thrown out baby, bathwater and the tub that contained both. MacFarlane described how the 2006 batch of graduates were given a free hand in defining their 'training', but told to focus on the specific task of identifying which social media would change the face of MR and then showing GfK how it should be applied.
The grads were given five mentors - a big investment of resource - but the firm dispensed with the 'hierarchical' idea of trainers and pupils in favour of a more liberal approach, encouraging the grads to co-create as a group using information from wherever and whatever, with the mentors standing by with advice. The team looked at Facebook, Bebo, and other shared media, selected social networking as their key area, built up a partnership with Bebo which included a site called Branded Minds and a Second Life avatar called Gabby (full name Gabriella Faith Kellner, alias GFK) to test some of their ideas. Bold stuff, and perhaps a little too much too soon, as the 2007 intake have partially gone back to more formal training (some would say 'to training'), but MacFarlane said she and her colleagues were struck by how confident and knowledgeable the grads seemed after the experience, and that the knowledge gained by the grads and by the training planners has been useful.
A number of spoilsport GfK managers seem to have ventured the opinion that they 'couldn't see the relevance of what the grads were doing to actually learning about MR'. Fancy that. We couldn't possibly comment.
News of ESOMAR awards will appear on DRNO tomorrow.
All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.
