“Let’s start with something we can all agree on: people and their skills matter for business performance.” So began May’s Capability Leaders Forum, opened by Rose Keen, Content and Insight Director at Econsultancy.
Econsultancy’s research backs this up: “One of the most consistent findings we get is that the biggest difference between businesses that outperform the market and those that don’t is how much they invest in their people and their skills,” Keen said. “However, not all those investments are equally effective.”
How to build capability programmes that work for 2026 and beyond was the subject of the forum. The panel brought together Abi Willstead from Specsavers, Dan Southern from Kimberly-Clark, Michelle Atkinson from Carlsberg Britvic and Econsultancy’s Paul Davies to share what is, and isn’t, working inside marketing capability building programmes.
The success of any capability programme rests on how well it connects to the work people actually do. Where a relevance gap opens between the content, skills or processes covered and the day job, behaviour is unlikely to change, meaning the organisation won’t benefit.
Whether the learning is really transferring through to theday-to-day is one of the key challenges”
– Abi Willstead, Head of Brand & Marketing Excellence at Specsavers
The same is true where barriers, technological, cultural or attitudinal, make newly acquired skills too hard to reach for in the flow of work. As Abi Willstead, Head of Brand & Marketing Excellence at Specsavers, put it: “Whether the learning is really transferring through to the day-to-day is one of the key challenges.”
Keeping skills relevant means responding to a marketing landscape that is not static. This is something most organisations struggle with. As only one in five marketers describes their organisation as able to respond to emerging skills needs.
Responsiveness matters, the panel agreed, but it is not the whole picture. “For a junior team member, there is no swifter route to advancement than getting really good at an emerging GenAI capability, say video generation or corralling AI agents,” Keen shared. “But the half-life of many skills has never been shorter. The leading tool today may not hold that position in a month’s time.”
Not all skills have the same longevity – or urgency. . The panel discussed approaches to balancing both new and foundational skills. Econsultancy splits these skills into two groups: evergreen skills, which are timeless and essential to marketing, and evolving skills, which shift with the market, new technologies and changing consumer behaviour.
Michelle Atkinson, Head of Marketing Capability at Carlsberg Britvic, described how she balances both: “I look at the brand-building programme we’re launching. We are looking to land those core skills that marketers need. But alongside those, we have leadership skills and we have future skills.”
Whatever names are chosen, splitting skills this way sharpens prioritisation. It stops teams chasing only the new and shiny, but it also prevent them getting stuck in marketing theory at the expense of practice.
Willstead described how Specsavers has applied this approach: “The first thing we did was really lean into those evergreen skills. Those foundational skills needed to raise the floor. Now, we’re in a position of really going after more of the Evolve part of that model.” With the fundamentals secure, the focus at Specsavers has shifted to those emerging skills, but even there the team is being deliberately selective.
Taking the view that the fundamentals do not compete with fast-moving skills. They are what make those skills usable. That matters particularly around AI, and the judgement needed to decide when an AI output is actually useful. As Willstead put it: “The risk here is that we become over-reliant on some of these AI agents to do our jobs.”
Dan Southern, Director of Marketing Capabilities at Kimberly-Clark, said that risk is pushing one skill area in particular up the agenda. “As our workflows become more reliant on artificial intelligence and LLMs producing outputs, we’ve got to make sure that the marketers within our community have very strong critical thinking skills.”
“I like to use the analogy of a library versus a gallery,” explained Paul Davies, Managing Director at Econsultancy. “If you walk into a library and you don’t know what you’re looking for, it is confusing. But a gallery, where everything is curated for you, is a better experience.”
Access and engagement are not the same thing
– Paul Davies, Managing Director at Econsultancy.
Many organisations, he added, invest heavily in a learning management system or experience platform, only to find that six to twelve months later almost no one is using it. “Access and engagement are not the same thing.”
For Atkinson, the issue is timing and need: “Nobody wants to learn how to change a tyre until they get a puncture. Then you want to learn how to change a tyre real quick.”
Building targeted, effective programmes demands a more learner-centric approach. When Southern arrived at Kimberly-Clark 18 months ago, isolated content existed, but it had been built without first generating curiosity or a desire to learn. That needed to change. “It’s about exciting people, making people curious and making people want to learn. Getting people to have learning agility,” he said.
Together, the panel’s experience and Econsultancy’s research point to a clear conclusion: building next-generation marketing capability is not about buying a platform or launching a series of courses. It is about designing learning that connects to real work, rests on strong foundations, and is supported by the culture and technology around it.
That matters even more now, in a period of rapid technological change. As Davies put it: “Capability programmes are transformation in disguise.”
Want to attend Econsultancy’s next Capability Leaders Forum and be a part of the conversation? Secure your seat here.