What Training 25,000 People Taught Me About How Marketers Actually Learn
Over the years, as an official Meta trainer and through programs for Google, the British Council, the United Nations, the European Union, JCI, universities, and many others, I'…
Over the years, as an official Meta trainer and through programs for Google, the British Council, the United Nations, the European Union, JCI, universities, and many others, I've trained more than 25,000 people in marketing and digital skills. That's a lot of rooms, a lot of workshops, a lot of watching the moment when something clicks for someone and the more common moment when it doesn't. Along the way I've formed some strong opinions about how marketers actually learn, as opposed to how we usually try to teach them. Most of what I believed at the start turned out to be wrong.
Information is not the bottleneck
When I started, I assumed my job was to transfer information. The learner didn't know how paid social worked; I knew; I would explain it clearly; now they'd know. Teaching as download.
This is almost entirely wrong, and the internet proves it. Every technical fact I could teach in a workshop is available for free online, in more detail, at any hour. If information transfer were the bottleneck, nobody would need training at all, they'd just read. Yet people who've read endlessly still can't do the thing. The gap between knowing about a skill and being able to perform it is the actual problem, and information doesn't close it.
Once I understood that, the whole job changed. My value wasn't in knowing things the learners couldn't access. It was in helping them cross the gap from knowing to doing, which is a completely different kind of work. The best moments in my training were never when I explained something clearly. They were when someone tried something, got it slightly wrong, and figured out why.
People learn by doing, badly, in a safe place
The single most reliable way I've seen people actually learn a marketing skill is to attempt it, fail in a low-stakes setting, and correct. Not to watch me do it. Not to hear me describe it. To do it themselves, imperfectly, and work out what went wrong.
This is why the hands-on portion of any training is where the real learning happens, and the lecture portion is mostly warm-up. When someone builds their own campaign, writes their own copy, sets up their own tracking, and it doesn't quite work, they learn something that no amount of watching could teach, because they now understand the failure from the inside. The mistake is the lesson. A training that protects people from making mistakes protects them from learning.
The implication for how you run a session is significant. The instinct is to maximize how much you cover, to pack the time with content. The better use of the time is to cover less and let people do more, because the doing is where it sticks. I'd rather someone leave having genuinely internalized three things they practiced than having heard thirty things they'll forget by the parking lot.
Confidence is often the real blocker, not capability
A pattern I saw constantly, especially with people newer to digital marketing: the thing holding them back wasn't ability, it was the belief that this stuff was too technical for them. They'd decided in advance that they weren't "a numbers person" or "a tech person," and that decision did more to stop them than any actual difficulty in the material.
Much of effective training, I came to realize, is less about teaching the skill and more about dismantling the belief that the person can't learn it. Once someone does one thing successfully that they were sure they couldn't do, the whole frame shifts and the rest gets dramatically easier. The first small win isn't small at all, it's the thing that unlocks everything after.
This changed how I sequence a session. Early on, I want people to succeed at something, quickly, so the "I can't do this" story starts to crack before we hit the harder material. Build the confidence first and the capability follows. Lead with the hardest thing and you confirm everyone's fear that they're out of their depth.
Relevance beats completeness
Early on I tried to be comprehensive, to cover a topic thoroughly, all the features, all the edge cases, the complete picture. I thought completeness was generosity. It's actually a burden. A comprehensive firehose leaves people knowing that a lot exists and able to do almost none of it.
What people actually retain is what's relevant to a problem they have right now. The small business owner doesn't need every feature of the ads platform; they need the specific path to reach more of their specific customers. The moment the material connects to a real problem the learner actually has, attention sharpens and retention jumps. The moment it becomes abstract completeness, eyes glaze.
So I learned to teach less, but to make what I taught land against something the person genuinely needed. Depth on the relevant beats breadth on the comprehensive, every time. The measure of a good session isn't how much ground it covered. It's how much the learner can actually do differently on Monday.
Everyone in the room knows something you don't
With enough rooms, you stop being the sole expert broadcasting to novices and start realizing that the collective knowledge in any group is enormous. The people in front of you have run businesses, tried things, failed at things, and figured out workarounds you've never seen. A training that treats them as empty vessels wastes all of that.
The sessions that worked best were the ones where I got people learning from each other, sharing what they'd tried, comparing approaches, solving each other's problems. My role shifted from source-of-all-answers to something more like a conductor, drawing out what the room already collectively knew and organizing it. People also trust a peer's hard-won experience in a way they don't quite trust an instructor's polished slides, so peer learning often lands deeper than anything I could say directly.
This takes some ego management. It's more comfortable to be the expert with all the answers. It's more effective to be the person who makes a room smarter than the sum of its individuals.
The teaching made me a better marketer
An unexpected result of all this: training tens of thousands of people made me significantly better at marketing itself. Explaining something to a beginner forces a clarity you can fake when you only ever operate at expert level. If you can't explain why a strategy works to someone who's never heard of it, in plain language, you probably understand it less well than you think.
Every time I had to strip a concept down to its essentials for a workshop, I understood it more deeply myself. The act of teaching is an act of clarifying your own thinking, and vague thinking survives inside your own head far longer than it survives a room full of people asking honest questions. The best marketers I know can all teach what they do. I don't think that's a coincidence.
What I'd tell anyone trying to build skills in a team
If you're a marketing leader trying to level up your team, or anyone responsible for helping people learn, here's the compressed version of what 25,000 people taught me.
Stop trying to transfer information; it's not the bottleneck, and it's freely available anyway. Create chances for people to do the thing, badly, safely, and correct. Attack the confidence blocker first, because "I can't" stops more people than "this is hard." Teach less, but make it relevant to a problem they actually have. Draw out what the room already knows instead of treating people as empty. And know that if you can teach it clearly, you understand it better, so the teaching sharpens the teacher.
None of this is complicated. But almost all of it is the opposite of how training usually gets designed, as a comprehensive download of information from an expert to a passive audience. The download feels like teaching. The doing, the failing, the small early win, the peer exchange, that's where people actually learn. After enough rooms, you stop mistaking one for the other.
