Swiss Marketing: You have to go through six steps

Time is racing. Just a few years ago, terms such as livestream, rating platforms and viral marketing were only known to IT professionals - today they are tools that every marketer must have in their repertoire. Professional associations such as Swiss Marketing must respond to such developments in order to keep their talents up to date. Knowledge needs to be constantly updated.

Cadences ever shorter

With this in mind, Swiss Marketing is running a major update program: "Currently," says Claude Dubois, Head of Examinations, "the new guidelines for marketing specialists (MFL) have been completed. The remaining three guidelines for sales specialists and sales and marketing managers should be adapted by the end of the year so that they can be put into operation in 2014." The lead time seems long, but during this process, the sponsoring associations of the respective professional examinations must give their approval, the Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology OPET must agree, and the schools need enough time to adapt their scripts to the new guidelines. The guidelines can be seen as a kind of "examination law", a set of learning objectives that defines what the candidates must be able to do, what the institutes should teach and how the experts should structure their cases. A paper that is intended to keep pace with the times. "In the past," says Dubois, "the guidelines needed to be refreshed every ten years or so, but today these cadences have become much shorter due to the rapid pace of development."

Basically, says the education professional, the essence of integrated communication has been strengthened for the new guidelines in terms of content, technological developments have been taken into account, overly academic terms have been removed and the practical approach has been strengthened. "All of this was always done with the intention of bringing our talents up to date," says Dubois. In addition, the topic of taxonomy points was given high priority and external knowledge was incorporated. Making understanding observable The six cognitive taxonomy levels refer to a system that goes back to the US psychology professor Benjamin Bloom, who used it to provide a formal framework for assessing an examinee's intellectual abilities. Swiss Marketing enlisted the help of Zurich-based adult educator and communications consultant Marcel Allenspach, who has also trained MFL experts in this field. "The principle of taxonomy levels," says Allenspach, "allows learning objectives to become transparent and observable." A very widespread didactic concept that can be applied to any type of learning content, regardless of subject. A candidate's learning objectives are grouped into six levels - K1 to K6, which are described using specific verbs. An example: At taxonomy level 1 ("knowledge"), the aim is to present what has been memorized without errors. A candidate should therefore name, recite and reproduce. K2 then aims to explore the candidate's understanding; they should be able to explain in their own words, give practical examples and generalize. The system extends through the further stages of "application" (K3), "analysis" (K4) and "synthesis" (K5) to "assessment/evaluation" (K6), where the candidate should "assess, check, refute". Important for understanding the six levels: K6 does not necessarily have to be "more difficult " than K1, but at this highest level, significantly more is required than simply reproducing memorized facts.

Rumba or samba? Salsa or merengue?

Allenspach describes his work as follows: "I was responsible for the formal classification of the learning objectives according to the content requirements of the subject directors. This linguistic and structural work can be seen as a kind of 'taxonomy policing'." Or, in more popular terms and applied to the world of dance music: You get ready-written works from composers. The taxonomy expert then determines whether these contributions are rumba or samba, salsa or merengue: "You determine the musical form, so to speak, but you don't compose it yourself," Allenspach explains. The taxonomy specialist pours the learning objectives into the six different levels, thus creating a grid that makes the learning objectives questionable, verifiable and assessable - or makes the samba really danceable.