How Sky’s Award-Winning Training Programme Revitalised Their Marketing Team
Sky is a household name in the UK, reaching over 95% of British homes with offerings spanning sports, news, movies and more. Like most companies, COVID lockdowns forced their staff behind screens for close to two years. When employees returned to the office, Sky found itself facing some key challenges.
First, collaboration had declined during the extended work from home period, which impacted Sky’s ability to attract and retain talent. With less in-person interaction across teams and verticals, creativity had suffered. Streaming giants and social media darlings had seen massive growth during lockdowns, and Sky now found itself vying for new hires against those flashier competitors.
Recognising these issues started at the employee level, but the rationale was more about getting from good to great in an increasingly competitive marketplace post-COVID. Sky decided investing in dynamic in-person training could spark the reconnection and engagement their marketers needed to drive business outcomes.
Sky Academy of Marketing’s 3-Day Curriculum
The Approach: Inspiring and empowering staff
In 2022, Sky collaborated with Econsultancy to build the Sky Academy of Marketing – a 3-day foundation course covering core marketing skills that integrated Sky’s own internal marketing approach. Completing the immersive programme has been mandatory for all marketing staff since the programme was created. It’s established a unified foundation of excellence across their marketing team.
The training programme covers 8 key topics and is designed to be practical, experiential, and high impact. The initiative has always been focused on inspiring Sky marketers to create award winning, unforgettable work that’s driven from their company vision: Believe in Better.
After the pandemic, the programme needed to be even more immersive – equal parts enjoyable, inspiring, and practical. By exclusively highlighting award-winning case studies, Sky aimed to reignite attendees’ passion for creating best-in-class work themselves. People weren’t just developing skills – they were having a good time, getting excited about the future, and making connections.
The goals were to inspire and equip teams to achieve excellence, have teams feel valued through career development and investment, and build energy and excitement around working at Sky.
Sky knew that for a training programme to truly deliver results, they needed full buy-in at all levels. Top-down support was crucial – so they secured solid support from their leaders and executives. Sky’s CEO, Stephen Van Rooyen, kicked things off by outlining his expectations in a video for all attendees.
In the video, Stephen Van Rooyen set the expectations and challenged the thinking of participants – giving them permission to take risks that might make their bosses uncomfortable, focusing on the customer in new ways – creating a rallying ‘call to arms’ through their design principles of Bold, Restless and Together. On top of this, he pledged support for new ideas, time, and credit for good work, to ensure senior leaders really listened and empowered the teams.
C-suite executives attended the event, signalling that if leadership cared this much, the initiative should matter to everyone at the company. But it was just as key that the 400+ marketers taking the course felt genuinely pumped to participate.
Winner – Employee Engagement and Experience
The programme unified Sky’s large marketing team around core values and knowledge, achieving a +26 to +60 (cohort 3) NPS. It re-energised culture while equipping employees with skills to drive better performance. This helped strengthen Sky’s employer brand and reignite its competitive advantage.
“We had a clear set of KPIs that we wanted to shift; front and centre was the happiness and engagement of our teams,” said Stratton.
The training was a key pillar of Sky’s overall Marketing Excellence Programme – fundamental to its success. It’s the critical piece that ultimately helped Sky win the Employee Engagement and Experience Award at The Marketing Society Awards.
Looking ahead: What’s Next for Sky?
The next evolution of the Sky Marketing Academy promises to keep the momentum going. The 3-day foundation course workshops, will continue to run annually and will look to create parallel bespoke master class modules to dive into important skills like Marketing Strategy, alongside the continuation of the rest of the Marketing Excellence Programme cadence of inspiration and industry access.
Sky also plans to build on the success of the 2023 marketing training program by entering the Marketing Society Awards again in 2024, as well as rolling out an internal awards program linked to the curriculum categories of Bold, Restless and Together behaviours.”
And it’s not just the marketers benefiting. Dave Stratton, Sky’s Marketing Director for Sports and Cinema, notes that other departments want in on the fun. “We made the training fantastic and engaging – we made it something that people wanted to come to. … It was so impressive that other functions wanted to be part of the training as well!” Sky is now considering adapting the concept for other functions. They aim to align everyone behind a shared vision and approach using the same riveting format.
The talent attraction gains are just icing on the cake. Sky is building a strong reputation as an exciting, progressive brand to work for. By continually investing in their people, that momentum seems likely to continue. The successful programme has paved the way for a high-impact training approach that evolves alongside Sky’s needs.