Channel Institute Training to Address 'Major Skills and Knowledge Gap'

The Channel Institute, a channel business training organization, is launching its online Certificate in Channel Management and Certificate in Channel Marketing courses.

The certificate courses have been reviewed and validated by a vendor-independent Industry Advisory Council, which includes channel leaders from Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and others.

Michael Kelly, director of the Channel Institute, tells Channel Partners the biggest challenge addressed by the two certificates is how to help channel partners market more effectively.

Channel Institute’s Mike Kelly

“This is a huge challenge in the industry and there is an alarming lack of best practice happening in co-marketing, both at vendor channel marketing teams, (the) channel management level and at channel resellers themselves,” he said. “Even though many tech vendors run their own training academies in house, these are often very product-oriented and do not cover industry-wide best practices.”

Business training in areas such as channel management and channel marketing traditionally has been provided by employers or consulting companies on an ad hoc basis, leaving a “major skills and knowledge gap” in the industry, Kelly said. This has been particularly true for new entrants to the profession, who typically come from end-user sales or marketing. These professionals often are recent graduates who are “thrown in at the deep end” of channel management and partner marketing, or are simply put through an employer’s own training academy that rarely focuses on industry-wide best practices, he said.

“The Certificate in Channel Marketing will help both marketers at technology reseller companies and channel marketers at vendors to learn (how) channel resellers can differentiate themselves from one another, competitively position themselves in a crowded marketplace and develop compelling value propositions, as well as many more channel-marketing specific learnings,” Kelly said. “The Certificate in Channel Management will help people who are relatively new to channel account management roles to get the most from joint business planning, understand best practices in channel relationship management and develop an effective partner recruitment strategy, plus many more channel-specific learnings.”

Free examinations and trials of both certificate courses are available here for channel professionals to test their knowledge.

Three more courses are planned to launch later in 2018: Certificate in Digital Co-Marketing; Certificate in Co-Selling; and Certificate in Business Transformation for Technology Resellers. Interested parties can sign up on the website for discounts and advance notification of course launches.