adWhite’s First Certification Day

February 14 was more than Valentine’s Day for all of us at adWhite. The entire day was set aside for training and updating our HubSpot certifications.

With HubSpot being the, well, hub of most of our inbound marketing activities, keeping up with this constantly evolving platform is key to using it efficiently.

And, as important as ongoing education is to us and our clients’ success, with the busy days we always seem to have, it can be very difficult to find time to set aside to keep up-to-date on the latest innovations. Plus, education requires a lot of concentration.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably noticed in the past 20 years or so that your attention span has been greatly diminished. I blame the internet and our phones, with constant interruptions and flashing banners enticing us to click here or there, emails arriving every few minutes, text messages popping up left and right, tweets flying, Facebook notifications sliding in, Ring alerts dinging about FedEx at your front door, or the latest YouTube mini schnauzer video begging for your attention … you know, a typical few minutes in the early 21st century.

So in order to give training the attention it deserves, we decided to set aside work for a full day, turn off email, put phones to sleep and just focus on learning.

As a project manager, the thought of not doing any client work all day was at first daunting to me. We try our best to take care of requests quickly, especially if they’re urgent or time-sensitive. What would happen if a problem with a client’s website popped up during training day? How will we get caught up the next day? I gave my clients advance notice that we would be doing a full day of training so no one would be surprised by my lack of communication. And fortunately, there were no emergencies. Our biggest challenge of the day came when we lost internet access for about 30 minutes — making it quite difficult to do online training.

It’s been a long time since my high school and college days. Not to brag too much, but I never needed to study hard to ace most tests. Learning always came fairly easy for me, and I was a very good student. Flash-forward 35 years, and things are different. The shortened attention span over the past 20 years makes for a more challenging learning environment.

But our training day was a success. I passed two certifications, and adWhite collectively spent 48 hours on education earning 20 new or updated certifications. The things we learned will help us all in our everyday activities.

Another reason (or 94) to keep up with HubSpot is that it’s constantly growing and changing. No longer a closed platform, HubSpot now partners with many other software developers to integrate their useful apps. So the more HubSpot grows, the more features can be deployed to our clients’ marketing plans.

We’ll be doing more training in the months to come, reinforcing what we’ve already learned and discovering new ways to help our clients grow. If you’d like to learn how inbound marketing services from HubSpot can help your business, get in touch.