The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) has launched an online diagnostic portal to allow businesses to effectively assess professional marketing capabilities across teams and departments.

CIM’s marketing analysis portal (MAP) is available for organisations as an additional analytical component of our 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.

Having the right skills is a concern many businesses face, with a CIM ‘State of the Industry’ report revealing in 2017 that a lack of marketing skills at a strategic level was a challenge for many organisations.

The report found that while marketers are excited about getting more involved in the strategic vision for the company (63%) and driving change within the organisation (61%), nearly all (93%) think that the marketing skills gap at a strategic level is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today.

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 and recommended solutions.

James Sutton, commercial director at CIM, says, “Marketing is a key function in delivering business growth and we believe that developing the capability with marketing teams is an essential part of driving performance. MAP will enable businesses to invest in their marketing capability with confidence.”

“The MAP portal provides marketing leaders with a comprehensive and holistic overview of their team’s skill set against our professional marketing competencies, allowing more balances and effective teams to be developed.”