Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Craig Kilford (pictured below), the brains behind CourseConductor.com, published an infographic recently that shows how social project management training companies are.
The research team (I’m guessing Craig didn’t visit 1793 websites by himself) found that Facebook is far and away the place that most training companies do their customer outreach.
This is interesting for me as I’ve done my own mini survey in the last few weeks asking if people would use Facebook as a tool to support them during a training course, and the answer has been a resounding ‘meh’. People don’t seem bothered about using Facebook groups as a training support aid – some do, some don’t and a few people responded to me saying they’d rather use LinkedIn.
LinkedIn does garner some 2.6m followers in the project management training space, so it isn’t an insignificant platform.
The CourseConductor survey highlights some other interesting facts too.
- There are more people in the USA following training providers on social media than anywhere else.
- 44% of training providers don’t use social media as a tool to engage customers or potential customers (why on earth not? This was a massive question raised to me when I read the results. It’s not like it’s hard or anything…).
- There’s hardly anyone on G+ in Peru.
- France, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands all have communities that engage more on LinkedIn than Facebook or other platforms.
Image snapped from the main infographic available here. I had trouble viewing it on Slideshare but you can click download and the PDF version works perfectly.
Craig’s LinkedIn article also points out that in a world where bite-sized learning is on the rise, video is a hugely under-utilised resource. Only 20% of training providers have a presence on YouTube and generally people aren’t following YouTube channels for training providers.
I’m not massively surprised by that: in many workplaces social media sites like YouTube are blocked, so if you want to watch videos for training, you’d be doing that outside of work when we’ve all got better things to do!
Also, it’s hard work to come up with video content. A training company can’t get away with a poorly shot video. The branding work and set up that goes into video production is much more significant than managing a Facebook page.
Finally, in my experience video is being cross-posted to Facebook anyway. I don’t need to follow a YouTube channel because I will see the video naturally in the other ways I choose to follow a company.
These are just my thoughts on the research results. Let’s think about what it means for project managers.
Does It Matter To Project Managers?
I think the way training companies reach out to potential customers does matter to us as project managers. It helps shape our perception of their company. It helps us test their wares and develop a view of their teaching style.
I also think it’s interesting that Facebook is the tool of choice – perhaps this shows that training companies are angling their courses more at entry-level and junior project management personnel. At the risk of stereotyping: the Millennials in your team are likely to be very confident using Facebook and any good marketer wants to be where their target audience is hanging out.
Social media does matter to project managers because it’s more and more the way we review courses, share views about courses, comment on learning experiences and tell our friends and colleagues about what we have been up to. That includes the good, the bad and the ugly about our project management training. Even I did a course review on video for my APMP prep course last year (which you can watch here).
I’m sure that whether or not the company has a good Facebook page or an active Twitter feed isn’t the only consideration you pay attention to when choosing where to invest money in staff training. However, it might start to change your investment decisions over the next few years.
What do you think?
Posted on: January 15, 2017 11:59 PM |
Permalink