The default bias toward hiring
When a capability gap appears, most organisations default to hiring. It feels decisive and it produces visible progress, a job description, an interview process, an offer letter. There is something satisfying about the clarity of adding a person to the team.
But hiring is expensive in ways that are not always fully accounted for. The direct cost of a senior hire, salary, employer contributions, onboarding, is significant. The indirect costs are larger: the time spent on the hiring process, the management bandwidth consumed in the first six months, the cultural disruption of adding someone new, and the risk that the hire does not work out.
Training is slower and less immediately satisfying. But for the right capability gaps, it produces outcomes that hiring cannot: institutional knowledge deepened, existing relationships leveraged, and a team that grows more capable over time rather than one that turns over regularly.
The four questions to ask first
Is this a knowledge gap or a capacity gap?
This is the most important distinction. A knowledge gap means your team does not know how to do something; they lack the skills, frameworks, or experience to execute effectively in a particular area. Training can close a knowledge gap, provided the gap is not too wide and the person is genuinely motivated to develop. A capacity gap means your team knows how to do something but does not have enough time or resource to do it at the required volume or quality. Training will not solve a capacity gap, you need more resource, whether that is headcount, freelancers, or an agency relationship.
How urgently does the capability need to be in place?
Training takes time, typically three to six months before a meaningful improvement in output quality is visible. If you need the capability in place within four weeks, training is not the answer. Hiring or bringing in a specialist on a project basis is faster, even if it is more expensive in the short term.
How specialised is the skill?
Generic marketing skills, clear writing, project management, data analysis, stakeholder communication, are trainable in most motivated people with a reasonable baseline. Highly specialised skills, advanced performance creative at scale, complex attribution modelling, enterprise ABM programme management, tend to require someone who has already done it at a comparable level of complexity. The learning curve for highly specialised skills is long and the cost of getting it wrong is high. In those cases, hiring or contracting for the specific expertise is usually more efficient than trying to develop it internally.
Is this a permanent or temporary need?
If the capability is something the business will need indefinitely and at increasing scale, building it internally through training and development makes sense. If it is project-based, a specific campaign, a one-off rebranding exercise, a market entry, a contractor or agency relationship is likely more appropriate than a permanent hire.
The best teams are built through a deliberate combination of training, hiring, and the clarity to know which situation calls for which.
The case for investing in training more than you currently do
Most growing businesses significantly underinvest in marketing training relative to what they invest in marketing tools and media. The result is a team that has access to powerful platforms but lacks the frameworks and judgment to use them effectively.
A mid-career marketer who receives twelve months of structured coaching and training, in strategy, data interpretation, and campaign management, will outperform the same person with no development investment, regardless of what tools they have access to. The compounding effect of skills development over a two- to three-year period is substantial, and the retention benefit of investing in people's growth is real and measurable.
The team that gets better over time
The businesses that consistently outperform their peers in marketing are rarely the ones that hired the most aggressively. They are the ones that combined smart hiring with deliberate capability development, building a team that gets better over time rather than one that turns over every eighteen months. Treating the build-versus-hire decision as the strategic question it is produces better outcomes and lower long-term costs. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but both require intention.