 Hello and welcome to today's qualifications webinar, the power of thinking to grow your career. Before we get started I'd like to go over a few items so you know how to participate. The presentation will last for approximately 40 minutes and you'll be able to send text questions to today's presenter by typing your questions into the chat box of the control panel. You may send in your questions at any time during the presentation and we'll collect and address as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. Unfortunately, we don't send slides of the presentation. However, the webinar will be available to watch on demand via our content hub exchange in the next couple of working days. I would now like to hand over to Imran Farouk, who will be today's presenter. Imran. Thank you very much, Maureen. Let's get going. I am excited to be presenting today. My big promise to you is that there will be something in this presentation which you can take away and take action on and it will have a great impact on your career. In return, what I'd like you to do is webinars are a distraction. So, if you can disconnect from your emails, disconnect your mobile phone and focus on this webinar just for a short period of time, and there will be something you can take where it requires your attention and focus. There are two parts to this presentation. Firstly, looking at the power of thinking. The second part will dive into a bit of detail on the level six revised qualifications. If you have a pen and a piece of paper, grab it. There's a magic in using a pen and a piece of paper to make notes. So, if you see something in this presentation, look for the one thing that's going to make a big impact on your career and put it down as an action. So, the first thing, have you spent some time thinking about your personal pathway? Have you spent some time designing it? For those of you who do have well-designed career pathways, you can see progress. It's less stressful. For those of you who haven't spent time, it can be a stressful journey. Right now, you're probably doing one of four things. You've either got a promotion, which is great. So, you now have to perform in your new role. You might be in a position where you have come to a bit of a blocker, and you're struggling to move to the next stage. There are things stopping you from progressing. You might be in a situation where it's going a bit downhill. You may have fallen into a bit of a hole and you stuck there. I've spoken to marketers who have been there for years and figuring out a way out. Or it could be worse. You may have to take these side steps in your career or going backwards. You may have to take some kind of demotion to make progress. So, we'll talk about some of these things. And there's lots of you on this call are going to all be at different stages. Some of you have a starting journey. Some of you are on a very lonely journey. And have a think about where are you now? Where do you want to be in the future? What are these roles? What are these points in your career? There could be career points like a manager, director, board level. There could be other points. If you're a freelancer, then you live in a very different world over your consultant. These points might be the clients you want to gain in the future. So, why have I decided to focus on the power of thinking? You probably can look back and reflect. The person you were five years ago is not the same person you are now. And you may have seen this saying, same old thinking, same old results. What you got here, what got you here, what necessarily get you there. So, maybe for you to move to the next level, you have to become a different person. And you may have everything in place externally, the skills, the people. But there's a component which is inside you, which is your brain, your internal. And if there's limitations within that, that is going to stop you from progressing. There's many, many things that what I'm going to talk about is called if you're following any brain scientists. And there's something called a reticular activating system. And the concept is what you think about is what you bring about or what you think is what you're going to become. And the concept is your eyes and ears can only see and hear what your brain is telling them. So, whatever the system is called, it's not important. I'm not a brain scientist. But what I want to make you aware of it is you have a filter in your brain, which controls the information and the sounds that are put to the forefront of your brain. It's something that's subconscious, but can be controlled consciously as well. An example of this, if you were in the airport with lots of noises around you. In fact, there's probably a thousand things that are taking place around you. And you're walking through looking for your gate. There's kids making noises. There's loud speakers. There's so many different things happening. But if your name got called out, you would just hear it straight away. So that is the filter. And there's many examples. A common example is if you decided to purchase a car or were interested in a car, all of a sudden you start seeing that car on the road everywhere. So you become conscious that that is there. The reality is that them cars were already there in the first place, but the filter is bringing that information to the forefront of your brain. So one of the things that I'm going to talk about in this presentation is what can you insert into that filter to help you in your career path? So first thing, everything starts with a thought. There are thousands and thousands of thoughts running through your brain every day. Some of them leap out. Some of them stick. Some of them evolve. Some of them just disappear. Some of them combined with the right elements can spring you into action. So I'm going to talk about some of them elements. What are the elements that connected with thoughts can catapult you into action? And action is, you know, there's a number of things that you can do. You can decide to take no action. You can take the right action. You can take the wrong action, but you could also take massive action. If the emotions are in place and you have a high level of motivation and some of the things I'm going to talk about that can catapult you into action. One of the things I want to talk about is success and mindset. So success is a choice you have to make. So you have to treat success as a duty, as an obligation, as a responsibility. It's not a choice. It's not a job, but you have to proactively commit to it. You have to ask yourself, are you fulfilling your potential? Do you want success? Is more success bad for you? What is the impact of it around you? The reasons why I want to talk about this power of thinking is because it's an important element that can help you leap over potential hurdles you have in your career. Also, more importantly, some of the elements I'm going to talk about is if you fall in one of these holes, how do you bounce back up? For some people, rock bottom is a trampoline. You bounce back up. And things happen in your life. For some of you, you might spend five minutes crying about it and you bounce back up. For some of you, you might spend days, weeks, months. I've come across people in their careers who have spent years in their role that they've hated and they haven't figured out a way to bounce up and make progress. This is a model I'm working on called the pivotal marketer. So it's something I've developed. And as a marketer moving into the next 20 years, I mean, I've been educating thousands of marketers. So I think a marketer these days has to have more in terms of not just knowledge, there's a lot more a marketer has to do to be successful on the marketing career. So it's not just about learning the four P's and the seven P's and the modern marketing model. It's about becoming a marketer that's pivotal. And there's many aspects of that. So if you're following me on LinkedIn, you can connect with me. I'm talking more about this model, but the presentation today takes some aspects which are related to thinking from this model. And before I go into my main part of the presentation, a quick insight into my journey. I've spent the last 20 years educating marketers. I've been a pioneer in helping developing marketing qualifications. So we run a master's in digital marketing and the CIM suite of qualifications. I've also stepped into a practical world of consultancy. And that's doing sales and marketing for businesses which have generated millions in revenue. So I had a company called MMC Learning, which is a CIM study centre. And also a joint venture company with the Manchester Metropolitan University. But the reason why I do what I do is to help marketers to help marketers succeed. And we have a 2025 mission to help 10,000 marketers succeed. So let's start going to this slide deck. And the first thing I want you to have a look at is to understand the structure of this presentation. So I'm going to talk about things which will help you catapult all of these hurdles that you've got. But I also want to cover some reflections on things that might be getting you down and might pull you into these holes. And I'll give you some exercises to do off the back of this presentation to get more clarity. So the first thing, and you probably may have come across this talk by Simon Sinek on TED, he talks about a purpose. So the first thing that needs to be strong is you need to get clarity on your purpose. It may be an inspiration inside you, it may be something that's calling out internally. That's going to need to do something. And Simon Sinek, when he did his research, he researched a number of leaders. Have their Steve Jobs to Martin Luther King. And what he found was these leaders that are big influencers always talked about the why and the purpose before the how and the what. And that's strong. It's magnetic. It has influence to communicate in that way. Second thing is, do you have deep desires? So desires is important because desires can also catapult you into action. Them desires could be anything. It could be correlated. It could be figuring out how you have a more harmonious home life and a family life. So desires connected with thoughts are important. So the question is, what is a deep burning desire? Because we have desires all the time. So burning desire, which helps you to catapult is something that you're willing to burn your bridges behind you. You're willing to change. You're willing to change direction because of your desires. In fact, there's a story about an army general who was going into battle. And he landed on this island to battle with the opposition and they came in balls. So the army general told the captains to burn the balls. So they burned the balls. And the army general said to his army, we burned the balls. Actually, there's nowhere back. So we have to march forward and we have to win the battle. So they went on to win the battle. So what are the things that you're willing to look behind you and make a change for? Next thing, do you have a BHAG? Something that's intense. And BHAG is a term which is coined by Jim Collins and Jerry Koros in the book Built to Last. And it's a long-term goal which changes the very nature of business existence. So you can apply this to you personally. It's down to some big, hairy, audacious goals. So what's the point of having a big, hairy, audacious goal? If you have a bigger goal, so you're working in a junior role in marketing, and your big goal is to become a chief marketing officer in a large organisation. That's a very big goal from where you are now. But the power of these types of goals are that they will stretch you. They will pull you out of your comfort zone. So that's important to progress on this journey. And for different people, these big goals could be very different. And it's the intensity. And in fact, your goals might be very different. You may have experienced something in your life. That's been an intense experience which is gaining interaction. MTP stands for Massive Transformational Purpose. Some of the largest organisations in the world have had these massive purposes. And there are a handful of organisations in the space of two, three years that have generated a billion dollar turnover because they had massive transformational goals. And a big goal, for example, an MTP example is Google. They've decided to categorise the world's information. Big goal. The next component is also important because you have to swing into action as well as having a goal. But what's important is the secret to getting ahead is actually getting started. Go and break the overwhelming complex tasks into small manageable tasks and start the first one. So it's better for you to be consistent instead of spending hours on one task. It's better to spend 15 minutes a day consistently non-stop for a longer period of time. So the question here is your mind working for you. So we do have a challenge. We're very busy at the moment and your mind is sometimes not receptive for change. In fact, your mind is more receptive when it's less busy. So that's a challenge you've got on your hands. So when you're doing this piece of learning that you're looking at here, you know, by all means, if you're busy right now, do play this back when you're a little less busy. But it's important that your mind is in a state where it is receptive. And that's usually out of work hours, maybe before when you're going to sleep, before you go to sleep or when you're waking up. That's at points when your mind is more receptive. In terms of what's on your mind is also very important. I've mentioned it before, the filter system that's in your brain, whatever you're thinking about is what's going to end up at the forefront of your mind. So that presents an interesting challenge if you have got things that you're worrying about. And it's interesting. I mean, some of the brain scientists talk about the impact of what you're thinking on your food. So some of these researchers look at, you know, if you're in a stressful zone and you're worrying about lots of things, what you can affect you because it's not, it's converting that food into something else. And you've probably experienced it. If you wake up in the morning and you first thought it negative, you're going to experience a string of negative thoughts right after it. And in fact, this is a separate exercise which I've got on this deck. If you get a chance, what I want you to do at some point is observe the thoughts in your mind. And one of the interesting things I want you to observe is if you have a negative thought, I want you to observe the next thought that comes into your mind and the next thought that comes into your mind. And what you'll discover is once you have one negative thought, it could spiral into another one and another one. So becoming conscious of these thoughts in your mind. Which leads to my next slide, which is a question. What are you actually pouring into your mind? And you may have, and I've mentioned it, your thoughts influence actions. You may have heard of things done God at the door of your mind. What are you letting into your mind? And I'll be talking about the revised qualifications, charting into your marketing qualifications, which is obviously a positive thing to be pouring into your mind. One of the important aspects is to understand is that knowledge is an asset. You will get a return of it in the future years to come. A great model to focus your mind is this. It's quite a popular model created by a guy called David Allen. He's one of the world's most influential thinkers on productivity. He's got 35 years experience as a management consultant. He came up with a model GTD, getting things done. And it's a powerful productivity model. A component of the model is his horizons of focus. And you can look at all your tasks in different ways. And he uses the analogy of an aeroplane taken off. He's got a 50,000 foot level down to the runway level. So we've already talked about purpose, vision and why. And so on, which is your 50,000 foot. And then there's things rolling down from that, which is 40,000 foot, what will the vision look like sound like? At 30,000, what do you need to accomplish in the next 12 to 24 months to make your targets happen? 20,000 foot level two, what are the importance of your work and personal life to keep engines running? Level one, what are the outcomes you want to achieve? These are projects which have got multiple components. There might be campaigns that you're working on or projects you're working on. And then the runway level is the next physical, visible action that you need to take. It might be a phone call that you need to make or an email you need to answer. So why am I talking about this model and the brain? Because it's important that you understand the different levels. And it's important that you know that you're going in the right direction. And I've ment a thousand, well, I've caught a thousand of marks that have crossed last 20 years. And I've come across scenarios where some people are too big vision mission focused and they don't do the ground level activity to get there. And some people are stuck on the ground level activity and they wake up two years down the line and realise actually I haven't made progress to my ideal role and where I want to be. So this is a nice little quote. If you're somebody who I used to be like this a couple of years ago in my business, I used to start things and never complete things. So what does focus stand for? Follow one course of a course until success. This is a concept that has been around for the last 150 years. So we just researchers have been studying something called a floor state. I'm not going to spend too much time on this because I could speak about this for hours. Maybe it's another webinar. But what I want to bring your attention to is this is very important because of the noise we have around us. You need to be working productively. The concept of floor is about and you've probably experienced this. You've probably done an hour's work and it's felt as though you've done five hours work because your brain was in gear, the skills were right and you were in floor and you got a lot done in a short space of time. There are many factors that affect floor and the term has come from the adventure sport athletes world as well from surfers, sports people who kind of sit down your spas and there are many terms for it like being in the zone in the moment. And it's important to understand yourself and how you can get into floor and to give you an example on myself, when I'm doing a creative job I'm more creative before 9, 10 a.m. in the morning and if I was doing a creative task I'd do it much faster than doing it in the afternoon or the evening almost five times faster and it's getting to know and understand floor and a higher level floor is an experience as well because it's not just brain, it's physical and there are many examples, in fact a good example is coders who do coding, they can go non-stop and produce magical work in a short space of time and I remember a big example is Steve Wozniak who is one of the founders of Apple, he in his early days he used to take about six months to create a game on an old system some of you don't know, Tari's other computer system used to take six months to code a game and he sat down and coded the game in four days he didn't sleep for four days, went non-stop, he actually created I think it was the first, the tennis game where the ball was bouncing across the screen people playing tennis, a very basic version of it, going back about 20 or 25 years you can get into floor and there's going to be many characteristics I want to talk about three potential blockers three fears that are going to be holding you back in fact there's probably about seven fears but I want to zone in and focus on three and these are common to everyone, not just marketers but after doing a lot of coaching and coaching marketers I'm finding that these three are on top and they're big things that are stopping people from progressing and it's good for you to be conscious about these things so let's have a look at the first one the fear of being judged and you'll relate to some of these so what if people laugh at me if I do something what if I get embarrassed, embarrassed what if I'm not good enough, feeling insignificant this self-doubt is a killer of progression what other people think of me in fact I've been mentoring a few marketers who were looking at the LinkedIn profile and they were concerned if they did X, Y, Z what their colleagues in the organisation would think of them which is very interesting second one, fear of failure, another big one so this fear again stops you from making progress because it isn't associated with it it gets more challenging later in life the more you go on and if babies don't have it you don't have it at a young age but as you get older and older this fear of being a perfectionist really presents an interesting challenge and if you were to go out and study the most successful entrepreneurs on the market in the world have a look at how many times they failed to get to where they got to some of them, if you hear the stories they've had about 120 rejections to get to where they got to and the reality is this fear is an issue that stops you but the reality is to get better you have to fail this learning mechanism that you have to go through to progress to the next level and finally there is a fear for some people of a fear of success and I've certainly experienced this across the last couple of years and what does it mean there is pressure that comes from success so if you have been promoted or moved to the next level you've got a new responsibility you may have to behave a certain way there's an expectation on you for some of you getting a level of success means you're leaving your friends and your family behind so there's some challenges around this and there might be people around you who want to hold you back as well so it's something to reflect on so let's go through a couple of exercises because what I want you to do when you've got a moment is to go and do these exercises and spend some time when you're less busy so the first one is to go and have a look at someone out there who is successful who's achieved what you want to achieve and you've got to come up with a set of questions so you may have heard the saying success leads clues so if you want to be a chief marketing officer go and connect with a chief marketing officer learn from them ask them questions so just a point on questions the point on questions is you have to learn to ask the right questions and there's many things a prudent question is one half of wisdom the ability to ask great questions is important because the right question is going to give you the right answer so life is a question and you have to start the journey as a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step so to focus your mind I want you to, as one of the exercises I want you to think about your big three and start planning for this so this big three might be three organisations you want to work for it might be three roles you want to play in the future it may be if you're a freelance or a consultant it may be three clients you want to land or three deals you want to land and the way I want you to think about this is if you landed one of these things it's going to make a seismic shift in your individual situation and you're aligning yourself to this is you're going to know in depth what you need to do to align yourself to these you have to be proactive to position yourself against these big three and you have to become relentless in pursuing being a determined discipline to going for these and if this is important a consistent one hour per week zoned in focusing on these areas who, the what, the how about this big three get to know everything, the statistics the data the people for you to align yourself come back to this filter in your brain once you start doing this something magical will happen you will start seeing opportunities are already in front of you a couple of steps that I want you to have a look at is doing a spot analysis on yourself so you're familiar with a spot analysis I'll be doing it on yourself and there's a power again of getting to know yourself when you know yourself you're empowered when you accept yourself you're invincible as a quote goes so it's a powerful tool to apply to yourself so you're looking at what are you naturally good at what sets you apart what are you a specialist things that you struggle with what is limiting you opportunities what are you naturally good at what sets you apart what are your natural skills that are in demand out there these threats what happens if your job gets automated so that's something to watch out for automation is happening you need to plan for it there's opportunities the things to get excited about but the power of doing this spot analysis is you get to know what you can be the best in the world at you're getting to know what the big opportunities are out there for you and you're also following a deep passion so one exercise you can do is a feature scope so this is something I'd recommend to get clarity there's two versions of this one is taking a full piece of paper writing down a 24 hour clock next to it imagine a perfect feature day in the future so what time are you waking up where are you waking up what are you doing throughout the day where are you having lunch who are you having it with what car are you driving so map out your perfect feature day there's also a rocking chair exercise that Jeff Bezos did and a lot of successful entrepreneurs where they imagine themselves sitting on a rocking chair at the edge of age 5 or project yourself into the future and the power of this is you project yourself into the future but then you snap out of it you've got to be in that zone we snap out of it and you list all the regrets that you should have done in your life and exercises like this will give you clarity for you to work on this personal development journey so just to conclude this part of the presentation and there's a quote here which is from Abraham Lincoln giving me 6 hours to chop down the tree and I'll spend the first 4 hours shopping the axe so just to I mean if I was to summarise everything I've talked about here shopping the brain is important I know you guys as marketers are working really hard in your roles you're trying to progress but the reality is you have to learn to work harder on yourself than your actual role and in fact the reality is if you did that you should do better in your role and you get promotions so it's something for you to reflect on in your mind okay good let's move on to the second part of the presentation so I'm excited to be talking about the revised CIM qualifications and I'm going to have a quick look at level 6 and some of the modules on what these mean so level 6 the level hasn't changed it's all about developing a strategic skills enabling you to progress into managing my role so it's a great qualification in terms of progressing you from an operational level you may also be an aspiring manager you may not have been working in management for a number of years but don't have a level 6 qualification so it's good for a range of marketers so the revised qualification has gone live and the first assessment session is available for April 2020 so let's just deep dive quickly into what the revised qualifications look like so there's two qualifications here they're on two separate slides the first one is a deployment in professional markets so the way these qualifications works there's mandatory modules and there's electives so there's two mandatory modules here so market and digital strategy innovation in marketing and there's three electives that you can choose from so to get your qualification you need three modules so you do the two and the elective of your choice number three electives here customer and digital customer because there is resource management and managing brands so good selection of qualifications and I'm really excited about these because CIM have gone out done the research and asked employers what is required in the workplace so there's been some adjustments in creating this suite which is looking very exciting there's a diploma in professional digital marketing as well so if you're taking a digital route there's three modules here that you can do so the first module is common in both the marketing route and the digital route so it's the same module marketing and digital strategy and then you've got another two modules that you can do to achieve a diploma in professional digital marketing so I'd probably recommend that you download it have a look at the syllabus which route suits you and depending on what your role is you can go in that either direction or you could also combine routes as well so I've been told officially that you can actually gain two qualifications so if you're somebody who's split in the middle don't know whether to do digital or go down the kind of professional marketing route then you can actually combine modules and come up with both qualifications so you could study the modules that are highlighted in blue here and come up with two qualifications which is one option that you could take if you wanted to get both qualifications but I think the key thing is to look at your role look at what's relevant to you and your future and choose the relevant options and there's many people that can advise in the market on which direction you could take let me just run through so I'm heading towards the end of my presentation if you do have questions stop up them into the question box if you've got feedback on anything I've talked about please put that in I'll go through a couple of questions here on screen question one what do I do if I'm on the current existing qualification don't worry existing qualification is still running existing qualification is still relevant so you're not missing anything out if you finished the existing qualification you're still coming out with an official qualification which has worth high value in the marketplace and you've got till December next year to do it so the last exam board is quite a while off so you've got plenty of time to finish it if you don't complete it there are transition arrangements so again speak to how you're studying with if you're on an existing qualification if you're planning on taking a break or if you don't get to finish it within the time frame when can I start the revised qualifications there are some centres already delivering them now so the centre I head up at MNC learning has started delivering the revised qualifications in a distance learning format if you're interested in in distance learning and have a look at the kind of centres I've got a screenshot here I'll just show you where to find the qualifications so if you navigated on the CN website two qualifications and there's an option there you can see go on and have a look at the revised qualifications there's a study centre finder so depending on what type of study you want whether it's face to face depending on what location you're in depending on which modules you want to do there's many options for you there's a whole range of options and CN study centres that you can connect with and learn different routes and also depending on your budget the different prices and so on so there's a good range of centres and options for everyone so that brings me to the end of the presentation before we start taking a couple of questions if you want to connect with me feel free to ping me a connection on LinkedIn if you want to find out more about the model I'm working on and also I've actually designed some of the questions that I've included on this webinar I've actually designed a workbook a marketing creative on the workbook that you can take away and work on with a pen and a piece of paper it's a digital document and there's more questions in there for you to help you plan a successful career marketing so if you want to connect to me on LinkedIn or drop me an email I can send you a copy of the workbook and also if you really need further advice I'm happy to jump on a 30 minute call with you to help you discover what you need to do like I said my purpose and passion is to help you succeed and that's my team's purpose and that's the purpose I'm on I love working with marketers I've been doing it for 20 years so if you need help don't be afraid to ping me a message I can jump on a call with you don't advise me on your CV or LinkedIn profile the best route you can take going forward ok good that brings me to the end of the presentation Maureen don't know if there's a couple of questions that might be coming in brilliant thank you Imran we're now going to answer the questions that have been submitted just as a reminder you can still submit your questions via the chat box in the attendee control panel so let's move to our first question the first question is I have my level 6 with driving innovation what would I need to do to get my digital level 6 or is it best that I think about level 7 ok good so that's great that you've completed that module in fact let me just I can go back to that slide so that's one of the mandatory modules so you've got a couple of options here so if you've completed that module I mean I'd recommend that you study the other modules at this level and try and get the complete qualification I mean obviously it depends I don't know too much about your role so it depends on what you're doing right now where you're heading to next what your skill gaps are if there is a diagnostic online it might be worthwhile to have a look at this here diagnostic but have a look if you look at the modules here there are some great modules here on the marketing digital strategy and the digital customer experience and again because you've got that mandatory module you can combine and get both qualifications so depending on what your situation is I mean I'd certainly recommend completing the level six I don't know more if you have any thoughts around that Actually I probably misquoted the question the person has actually got their level six with driving innovation so I'm assuming that she already has her level six what would I need to do to get the digital level six so I'm assuming there that you would have to do the three modules required for the level six the level seven obviously is something to think about our leadership in marketing program is really designed for those people that probably are already in a senior marketing role or leadership role and obviously I don't know the person's background but I mean you've offered Imran an opportunity perhaps for individuals to speak to you so I mean that might be the best solution for this particular one Great, yeah I'm happy to jump on a call with you and give you personalised advice on which path to take Brilliant thank you I've got some more general questions here Imran one of the questions was can I just study one single module or do I have to study all the modules Perfect so that's a very good point so you can now study individual modules and get award qualifications it's a popular route that people do take and especially if you're busy and can't commit to a 9 to 12 month qualification if there's a specific need that you have and a gap that you have in your skills yes I'd certainly recommend that you take the individual awards there's many centres delivering individual awards so have a look at when they're running and it's a good option and you still get an official qualification from the Chartered ENCR marketing for doing that individual award I've just had another question coming in about the level 6 are there any exemptions when one already has driving innovation award at level 6 I'm not quite sure what they mean by exemptions there I don't know if you've got any thoughts Imran So if you've already done the I mean this is back to looking at the if you've already got an existing qualification with the CIM at level 6 and you've done existing modules there will be transition I don't know if it's on the CIM website yet but there are transition arrangements so if you've already done the innovation module and you going to move from doing the existing qualification to the revised qualification then yes you don't have to do that module again so the learning outcomes map on to the new version of the innovation so you don't have to do that module again you'd have to the others round it to get the qualification but do you have a look at the CIM website and I think that might am I going to question to the first if you ask the question as well so yes if you've done existing module which has mapped on to the revised you don't have to do that module again it's an exemption Okay a couple more general questions are the modules exam or assignment based? Okay so let's just flip back to this slide again so at the diploma they're all assignment based now so one of them used to be exam based so right now as it stands all these modules are assignment based so they're which is great all work based assignments so again there's a power ending work based assignments because you've taken everything you've learnt and you're applying it to your own organisation so some of the marketers that have been have qualified with us who have done these assessments on the back of it they've actually got promotions and they've won clients because they've taken the modules and digital marketing strategy for their organisation or for a client organisation and something life has been produced at the end of it Cool another question here do I have to be enrolled with a study centre to study this qualification or is there an option of self study? Right so if you are studying the method of studying is to find a study centre a place to study so that is the only route available so I mean if you in a scenario where you've got very specific preferences find the centre that suits you so there's different centres at different levels I mean if you prefer self study maybe a distance learning centre is good for you if you're somebody who needs to sit in a classroom engage with the class have people around you then there's options for you to do face to face so again feel free to connect to me and I can advise you on that Brilliant thank you another question here can I take a break from studying midway through the qualification? So the answer to that is yes there's some flexibility in the exam boards are available inside the Charlie MCR marketing so there's three exam boards in the year so if you decided that you wanted to do one what you'll go into the next exam board you can take a pause and go for a further exam board down the line but I need to make you aware of possibly two things firstly check with your study centre if it's okay to do that so technically there's no issue with that and there's come across many marketers who are who need because of life circumstances need to take a break from the qualification so technically yes you can do that the second thing that you need to make sure you're aware of is that there's components of the fees which are related to a membership and the assessment fee so the membership fee is an annual fee which you have to pay and it's actually a cheaper version as a study member you get the golden package at a lower cost but that that lasts one year so if you decided to delay your study and it goes over one year and you decided to do it the year after there's some fees that are going to be payable again so have a look at both the flexibility of your centre that you're studying with and also what fees you might incur for pausing and restarting okay thank you another question now how many years experience do I need to study at a level six qualification okay good question it's a combination of I'd say experience level I don't want to say have a couple of years experience because ideally you need to be progressing towards a management role to do the last six so at the very least you need at least I'd say two years experience there are options I know there's kind of graduate gateway options it depends what your scenario is whether you're kind of a university student who's graduated or you're somebody in the workplace so it kind of really depends on the scenario so experience is really good there is a route to obviously get on because the entry criteria is for you to have this certificate or an equivalent level four qualification you can get on to level six as well so there's a route to get on with less experience but what's important is that and what's important to understand is the assessment is assuming that you're working on a more strategic role you've got to have the ability to apply the assessment to the organisation and the assessment is more strategic rather than operational so it's whether you can really progress and be able to tackle the assessment at level six so it's a long-winded way of answering the questions so experience is really good but also having the right qualifications can actually qualify you for level six as well so if you've got higher level marks if you've got level four qualifications again feel free to send me a CV I'll have a look at it and advise you on the next step Great, thanks Imran Unfortunately that's all we have time for today I'd like to say a big thank you to Imran for presenting this webinar and thank you to everyone attending today Once you leave today's webinar you'll receive a survey on the presentation and we appreciate it if you would provide your feedback On behalf of CIM thank you for joining us today and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day Bye bye