Employee Training & Development Program

The Marketwave team is a group of learners with a growth mindset, but we discovered in 2019 that our formal training program hasn’t kept pace with our professional development needs. While we had done some agency-wide training sessions, we had never had a unified, consistent program that employees can plan on and leverage to develop new skills. The launch of Project Alpha in 2019 was aimed to provide that framework and a consistent calendar of programming that would feed our need for ongoing talent development. Leadership knew that the team would always have a queue of client work they would need to balance with training so having a mapped-out calendar and “digestible” training that fits the pace of agency life was important to implement. A branded identity for the program was also thought to keep it more top of mind for the team. Mandatories:

• Identity shouldn’t align too much with 2019’s yearly company theme because we needed the program to live on beyond 2019.
• Alpha could mean Alpha Dog but also could mean bringing your “A” game, for example.
• Use Marketwave’s primary color palette.

The creative team was given the brief to begin brainstorming Project Alpha brand ideas. Pretty early on, the phrase “Level up” kept coming to mind. “Project Alpha” reminded me of a Mission Impossible movie title or a video game, so the phrase felt fitting. I started developing an identity around this level-up-video-game concept, but I just kept wanting to make the concept bigger and bigger. So when we all pitched our concepts to our CEO, I pitched my base concept with its optional big-picture approach. My idea was this: We turn Project Alpha into its own real-life game, complete with a game board, individual characters, and rewards earned with each “level” achieved (tying in the “level up” tagline). Every training session would act as a level of the game and whenever an employee attended one, their game character would move up a level. In addition, they would receive a physical jewel (of the colorful, plastic variety) to keep as a token of their progress. If an employee did any independent study over a subject from a training session, they would receive a gold coin (of the plastic variety, of course). An employee would want to collect all of these as there would be an award for the most earned at the end of the year.