I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn applied skills — partly because it is relevant to my work, and partly because the gap between knowing something and being able to do it is one of the most underappreciated problems in professional education. A few months ago I went down a rabbit hole specifically on digital marketing courses, partly because I had a couple of friends making career transition decisions in that direction. What I found was more interesting than I expected, and it is worth thinking through if you are analytical about this kind of thing. The number that reframes everything The industry average completion rate for self-paced online digital marketing courses is under 10%. That number sounds like a typo, but it holds consistently across multiple data points and geographies. Nine out of ten students who enrol in an online digital marketing course — who pay real money, start watching content, take notes — never reach the end.…