P&G’s European brand director on the importance of on the job training

Q Is on the job training an important feature within P&G?

We are very passionate about training and it never really stops. It’s primarily on the job – there are certain standard programmes that people go through, such as our colleges for people at different [job] levels, but there’s also a mass menu of different things you can do both externally and internally to build your skills as a marketer. They are highly personalised to the individual job, passions and strengths of that person.

Q Who is responsible for on-job-the training at P&G?

The brand manager will train the new hire when they first come in and do a lot of the initial training. In addition to the colleges, we also bring in a lot of external people to speak to staff, such as our media partners, creative agencies or individual experts from different areas of business.

Q What impact has the growth of digital media had on how you approach training?

It has changed both the content and the way we do the training. In terms of the content, every brand builder needs to build digital expertise, meaning they need to know where the consumer is going digitally, and then also know all the different things on the menu that you can choose to use to do digital marketing.

We work with a lot of the big digital media owners to help us do either formal training, or a lot of that is on the job as well. This helps [marketers] develop new search strategies, social strategies and so on. A lot of our training is also available digitally, so there’s a menu of P&G training that staff can do when and where it suits them.