Liz Oke never expected to be conveying these professional development lessons. She began her career in 1999, before the advent of digital marketing. Coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, she took courses on the subject through the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and in 2014 was invited back to teach some of those courses. Oke never set out to be a teacher but found she thrived off of connecting with students and their rich experiences. 

“The first day I taught, I remember feeling a sense of panic,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘I don’t want to bore people to death. What can I say to stretch the minds of students and not just barrel through the course?’”

While teaching at U of T, Oke (pictured, right) was exposed to curriculum development, which eventually led her to help build the CM program five years ago. As a marketer, Oke is a storyteller at heart, and tries to bring that into the classroom.

“With adult learners, it’s all about hearing and sharing experiences, then doing hands-on work to reinforce a concept you’ve just learned,” she says. “As human beings, we’re wired to tell stories and share experiences, so that’s how I like to teach.”

Oke likes to remain in touch with former students. Some, she says, go on to get the promotion they wanted or switch careers from agency to brand marketing or vice versa. “The fact that I was able to help them is huge,” she says. 

A specialist in digital and content marketing, SEO, social media, UX and other related disciplines, Liz Oke has occupied many agency and brand marketing roles over nearly 25 years in the industry. Now, she’s passing down what she’s learned – including the need to “stay curious” – to the next generation through the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA)’s Chartered Marketer (CM) designation program. 

“It’s human nature to want to be comfortable,” she says. “But marketers aren’t engineered to be comfortable in what they’re doing. You shouldn’t do the same thing year-in, year-out. You have to change. You have to adapt.” 

And so, for example, Oke is on TikTok, mostly to pick up strategies for clients interested in the platform. She’s also experimented with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and believes the naysayers have exaggerated the AI’s career-killing potential. “People are saying, ‘I’m going to lose my job,’ but I don’t think so,” she says. “There’s a way we can use this technology to help us work better.”

Marketers who have come through the CM designation program should already be familiar with this idea of adapting. It’s embedded in the CM’s Creative Elements of Marketing (formerly Applied Marketing Core 3) module, which Oke, alongside other marketing professionals, helped shape as a CMA lead course developer. 

“We designed the CM program to cover all the ways marketers work, giving recipients a 360-degree view and making them well-rounded marketers,” she says. 

The two-year program is fully remote and consists of three applied marketing courses (Tools for Success, Finance and Campaign Execution and Creative Elements of Marketing, formerly Applied Marketing Core 1, 2 and 3), one specialization elective and a final summit course — taught with support from CM advisors and industry professionals. 

In Creative Elements of Marketing (formerly Applied Marketing Core 3), CM students experience the creative process from end to end. They swap between acting as agency talent in developing a creative brief and campaign concepts, to delivering feedback on creative ideas as brand marketers. The goal is to impart a deep understanding of client-agency relationships. 

Oke and her peers wanted CM students to experience both sides of marketing. Part of that comes from the mix of professionals participating in the program. 

“We might have a marketing manager who works for a major house builder and has always been in that industry or career, and then in comes an account executive or a manager at an agency,” she says. “They come together in this course with very different experiences as marketers, and so come out with well-rounded knowledge.”

For more information on Chartered Marketer’s program please contact – learning@thecma.ca