Are you digitally relevant? Or do you feel as obsolete as your video machine? Does your six-year-old help you work your DVD machine and do you give your latest cellphone upgrade to your kids, preferring to hang onto your old brick as at least you still know how to make calls on that one? Are you actually wondering what it means to be 'digitally relevant'? Join the club; you're far from alone. But the good news is, is that we're still at the early adopter stage in the South African media, marketing and advertising industry as regards much of the technology on offer and new media solutions. So there is time to catch up. But, as Dr Ludi Koekemoer, rector of the AAA School of Advertising, says: students know more than their lecturers with new media applications. The academic institutions are also of the view that one has to embrace a continuous process of lifelong learning to keep up to date in your chosen career path. So each article that teaches you something, every seminar you attend with the experts and every in house training course that you benefit from, all goes into growing your skills base. The Chartered Marketers qualification which represents continuous learning in this field, was relaunched and rebranded today under the auspices of the Services SETA. And as Koekemoer puts it, lifelong learning should take place in order to avoid staying in a silo: professional and personal development needs to be continuous to obtain broader and specific perspectives and increase knowledge, skills and confidence.
Enjoy! Louise Marsland, editor: editor@bizcommunity.com. All marketing news to: marketingnews@bizcommunity.com. Responses to this column welcomed on Bizcommunity.com or on our blog: http://blog.bizcommunity.com.