According to a recent study conducted by CXL Institute, marketing leaders haven’t closed the skills gap—despite spending almost $1,000 per employee and billions annually on training.

The study surveyed 462 marketing leaders across a variety of sectors, including travel, publishing, non-profit and ecommerce, who all identified that developing and retaining marketing talent is a common challenge.

After sifting through the results, we came away with seven key takeaways on marketing training:

1. Bigger companies feel better about their skills.
2. Training budgets aren’t big, but they’re getting bigger.
3. Companies that live online have better marketing skills.
4. Direct managers own marketing training.
5. Autonomy at small companies applies to training, too.
6. A structured process doesn’t guarantee training success.
7. Finding talent who want to learn—and keeping them—is hard.

Those seven findings have two patterns: Smaller companies struggle more than larger companies, and marketing talent remains in high demand.

For companies that don’t already have an online presence, the skills gap in marketing is even wider. When asked to rank their company’s strength in marketing, offline business leaders gave an average score of only 6.6 out of 10—online business leaders gave a score of 7.4.

Structured, well-funded training programs might be the solution to closing the skills gap. Marketing leaders from larger organizations were more confident in their marketing talent—they also led the way by offering regular, recurring training for employees. Leaders from enterprise-level organizations were also more likely to increase training budgets in 2019.

“It’s easy and common for even the most experienced marketers to gloss over the basics and lose touch with the fundamentals of good marketing,” says Hana Abaza, Head of Marketing at Shopify Plus, an enterprise ecommerce platform for large and growing online stores. “A good training course is rooted in these principles, even if the topic is more tactical in nature.”

For the full report visit www.conversionxl.com/blog/state-of-marketing-training-2019/.