Over at State of Digital this summer we are talking to several Digital marketing experts around a topic which is close to my heart: Education.

I come from a family of teachers, my dad taught French and was head of my high school, my mom was a Teacher, my grandpa, grandma and several aunts and uncles were. My sister still is. So you could say it’s in my blood.

As you may know I am a trained but not practicing teacher. I never ‘really’ became a teacher, but somehow the blood flows and you can’t stop it. Even though I don’t teach what I was educated for (history) and even though I swore never to become a teacher, I am.

I do a lot of training sessions, for business schools, colleges and in company, and speaking, though, which is also a form of educating others, as is writing on a site like State of Digital.

I just can’t help myself: I have to be involved with teaching one way or another. Simply because I believe that if we teach, we help others go forward. And because teaching is in a persons DNA, not just mine, yours as well. People like to teach and like to being taught. Humans after all want to continue to evolve and the only way you can do it is through Knowledge.

Think about it, when at a birthday party, people are constantly trying to teach the others lessons. Whether it’s showing off their knowledge or showing them barbeque tips: people teach. We can’t live without teaching and being taught.

So I decided to do a little bit more with teaching and education at State of Digital. For these reasons above, and because I’ve noticed a lack of knowledge about digital marketing with marketers I ran into. Recently I did a webinar on blogging and we have been writing white papers, but I wanted to do something more.

I noticed that getting knowledge is closely related to trust. We trust our teachers and want to preferably walk the same route as they did. And we trust teachers who actually did the work more than theoretical teachers. But instead of being the teacher myself in this case I wanted to gather information from other teachers: the industry experts.

Especially in a young industry like ours it is interesting to look at how people gained their knowledge. Because they come from different, mostly not digital native, backgrounds. How can we learn what they know? By doing their jobs off course, but we can take a few steps quicker by asking them for some ‘short cuts’.

So I decided to ask several experts about their education. How did they get their knowledge and what should you do to gain similar knowledge.

I am very proud that some very knowledgeable people agreed to answer questions about their education and give tips on the education (young) marketers should get, and how they should get it.

Every few days we publish a new interview on State of Digital. So far we’ve seen interviews with for example Sara Clifton, Marcus Tandler, Bill Hunt, Marty Weintraub, Aaron Wall, Andrew Girdwood and Bill Slawski. And many more I haven’t mentioned yet. And many more to come as well.

It’s a very useful series. At the end I will off course make summaries of the most important lessons, but I can tell you this: if you want to learn and improve yourself (and who doesn’t right? ) you should follow these.

Here’s the overview of the series:

http://www.stateofdigital.com/tag/summer-school/

Let me know your thoughts and how your education helped you get further in your job.

(also published on Linkedin)

From Bas Van Den Beld Bas van den Beld