A manager decides the team needs to be better at something and the decision immediately turns into a purchase. Someone asks for a budget, someone else asks for a provider, and within a fortnight the conversation is about which course rather than about what is actually wrong. That sequence is why so much training money produces nothing you can point at six months later.
The word upskilling covers at least three different purchases with different prices and different failure modes. This is how to tell them apart, and what the free option genuinely covers before you spend anything.
What upskilling usually means in practice
When a marketing manager says the team needs upskilling, they almost always mean one of these, and they are rarely specific about which.
- A capability gap. Nobody on the team can do a thing the plan requires. Nobody can build a tracking setup, nobody can write a brief a designer can use, nobody can read a report past the top line.
- A confidence gap. People can technically do the work but hedge every decision upward, so the manager is the bottleneck on everything.
- A consistency gap. Three people do the same job three different ways, and the output quality depends on who picked it up.
Only the first is solved by teaching. The second is usually solved by giving people the authority to be wrong about small things, and the third by writing down how the work is supposed to be done. Buying a course for a confidence or consistency gap is the most common way training budget disappears without a trace, because the course is genuinely good and the problem was never knowledge.
So the first question is not which course. It is: if this person knew the thing, what would change next week? If the answer is nothing concrete, you do not have a training problem yet.
The free option covers more than most managers assume
Before spending anything, exhaust the platform certifications, because they are free, current, and considerably more rigorous than their reputation suggests. Google's own documentation on Google Ads certifications sets out the terms plainly: five certifications count toward Google Partner status, covering Search, Display, Video, Shopping and Apps. Each assessment requires 80 per cent or better to pass, runs to a 75 minute limit that cannot be paused, and can be retaken one day later if you fail. The certification is valid for one year and has to be retaken to renew.
Two things in that list are worth dwelling on. The 80 per cent pass mark is high enough that somebody guessing will not clear it, so the certificate is real evidence that the person sat with the material. And the one year expiry is the useful part rather than the annoying part: it means a certification held today says something about current product knowledge, which a course certificate from 2023 does not.
The assessments are offered in 22 languages, so this is not an English-only route. For a team of four, a month of platform certification costs nothing but working hours, and it will close a genuine capability gap on the mechanics of the ad platforms completely. If that was the gap, you are done, and you should stop reading and not spend the budget.
What certification does not cover, and never will
Platform certification teaches the platform. It is built by the company that sells the advertising, which makes it excellent on where the buttons are and structurally silent on the questions that decide whether the spend was a good idea.
Nothing in it will teach a person how to decide a budget is too small to learn from, how to tell a client or a founder that the campaign is not the problem, how to sequence a quarter, or how to judge when to stop. Those are judgement, and judgement is built from cases, feedback and being wrong in front of someone more experienced. That is what structured training is for, and it is the only honest reason to pay for any of it. Our longer read on free versus paid marketing courses and what the money really buys works through the same boundary in more detail.
It is also worth being realistic about what a certificate signals to anyone outside the team. We looked at the evidence on that in whether employers actually care about marketing certificates, and the short version is that they care about the work it let you do, not the badge.
The three ways teams actually buy this
| Route | What it suits | Where it disappoints |
|---|---|---|
| Free platform certification | A clear, mechanical capability gap on a specific platform. Costs hours, not money. | Teaches the tool, not the decision. No feedback on your actual work. |
| Individual enrolment on a structured course | One or two people who need the whole picture, not a module. Portable, and the person keeps it. | Does not travel to the rest of the team unless somebody makes it travel. |
| In-company team training | A shared consistency problem, or a team big enough that a common vocabulary matters more than depth. | Expensive, and wasted where the real gap was individual rather than shared. |
We sell the middle one. That is worth saying plainly, because it means our advice is not neutral, and the middle one is genuinely wrong for a team whose problem is that three people work three different ways. If what you need is the third route, our corporate solutions page is the honest starting point, and the format differs enough from individual enrolment that treating them as the same purchase leads to the wrong one.
How to tell which one you need
Run the diagnosis before the purchase, and it takes an afternoon rather than a quarter.
- Write down the three tasks that went badly in the last month, in specific terms. Not "reporting is weak" but "the monthly report took two days and nobody could say which channel drove the sales."
- For each one, decide whether the person did not know how, did not feel allowed to decide, or did it differently from a colleague.
- Count which of the three categories wins. That is your actual problem, and it will usually not be the one you assumed.
- If it is a knowledge gap, check whether a platform certification covers it before looking at anything paid.
The exercise tends to produce an uncomfortable result, which is that one person needs real training and the rest of the team needs a written process. That is a cheaper outcome than the one people expect, and it is the most common honest answer.
What to do in the first month
Whatever route you take, the training is not the intervention. The intervention is what the person is asked to do with it, and that has to exist before they start or the knowledge decays quietly.
Give each person one real piece of work that requires the new skill and has a deadline inside six weeks. A tracking setup that must go live. A report format that becomes the standard. A campaign they own end to end. Without that, you have bought a certificate. With it, you have bought a capability, and the difference costs nothing.
For people doing this alongside a full workload, the scheduling reality is its own problem, and we wrote about it in studying digital marketing while working. A manager who sends someone on a course without protecting the hours has quietly made it the person's evening problem.
The honest limits
None of this works on a team that is under-resourced rather than under-skilled. If three people are doing five people's jobs, training is a tax on the time they do not have, and the results will be worse for six months before they are better. Fix the load first, or accept that the timing is wrong and revisit in a quarter.
Equally, if the person you want to upskill is already learning on their own and simply lacks structure, paying for a course may be redundant. Khaled Badr's argument for learning marketing without courses, and what that route costs is a fair account of when the self-directed path is enough, and it is worth reading before signing anyone up to anything, including us.
Finally, no training fixes a strategy problem. If the team is executing well against a plan that was never going to work, better execution produces the same result faster. That is a conversation with whoever owns the plan, and the answer to it is not a course. If you do decide a course is the right call, the six questions to ask before choosing one will save you more than any discount will.