The current state of the digital marketing skills landscape.
The results from our survey of over 700 marketing professionals are in! The responses have allowed us to develop a picture of the current state of digital marketing skills. They come from across the UK and US, but were predominantly from UK marketers, so help us to accurately understand the digital skills landscape of the UK marketing industry in 2016.
Marketers tend to fancy themselves as fairly skilled in strategy, content marketing and social media marketing. Although interestingly no one area had over 50% ranking themselves as skilled or highly skilled, and a considerable 38% also said they wanted to improve their strategy and planning skills. This was the skill marketers were most likely to say they wanted to improve.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is a real shortage of more technical expertise like coding, mobile marketing and graphic design. A…
Helpful tips for jobseekers looking to break into tech
The future of the tech industry is as promising as ever—and it bodes well for today's job seekers. In 2015, the United States created roughly 6.5 million jobs in the tech industry. Recruiters predict that IT jobs will continue to grow by up to 22% through the year 2020.
While Silicon Valley in California is considered as the home of the main tech startups, other cities like NYC also have a consistently growing tech industry. In fact, New York outpaced Silicon Valley regarding growth with a 33% increase in tech jobs since 2009.
Source: Business Insider
Despite the ongoing rise of tech jobs, millennials and members of the “Gen Z” are faced with one dilemma—competition.
Tech startups know that, if they want to keep up with today’s level of competition, they…
How marketers can use a range of skills to boost their careers
As digital marketing (and marketing in general) continues to evolve, so does the thinking associated with what makes a modern marketer. There have been numerous posts about T-shaped marketing, the Pi-shaped marketer, growth hacking and even ninja rockstars! (see more silly digital marketing job titles)
Whilst I’m conscious that there are already plenty of marketing buzzwords around, I nevertheless thought it worth exploring another concept: the full-stack marketer.
However, I’d like to use this post to look at the full-stack marketer not as another piece of marketing jargon but more as a mind-set or working philosophy. I don’t believe the full-stack marketer is a substitute for growth hacking, T-shaped or Pi-shaped marketing. Instead, all this thinking should be considered with the same objective in mind: to give marketers a framework and opportunity to grow and develop.
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Latest report on marketing hiring from McKinley Marketing Partners shows strong demand for digital skills
We hear from plenty of thought leaders that we are now in a 'post-digital' age, that we shouldn't be siloing digital and so digital is a pointless term. Whilst we agree digital should permeate the entire organisation and marketing department, rather than being a 'silo', that doesn't mean the word digital is irrelevant. In fact, specifically digital skills are in demand like never before, and this is highly apparent in the latest hiring trends.
Looking back at the data from 2015, we can see that digital marketers are highly sought after, being the most hired type of marketing professional in 2015. Of the companies surveyed 39% hired a new digital marketer, whilst only 1 in four hired a new project manager. This is interesting as in 2014 project manager was in the top three most hired positions in…
Showing how switching from working client to agency side can help your career progression
After spending the best part of a decade as an in-house client-side marketer, I recently made the decision to experience life as a marketer within an agency. My ambition is to continually develop myself as a rounded marketer, something I’ve tried to demonstrate using the ‘T-shaped marketer’ approach and I felt the change to agency-side marketing would help me to meet my personal development goals.
There are a number of advantages for marketers who experience both agency and client-side marketing and in this post I’ve tried to summarise some of the stand-out differences that I've experienced and how they can help marketers looking to develop their careers.
Culture
One of the stand-out differences I found when moving from client to agency-side was the company culture. I'd come…
Tis the season for Digital Marketing Exams. It's time to F.R.E.A.K.O.U.T!
So my cohort of IDM friends have recently been speaking about the upcoming IDM Digital Marketing Diploma exams. Speaking might be better rephrased as "freaking out". Why? well, we are all feeling pretty overwhelmed by the scale of the digital marketing landscape these days.
Not one day has passed since (well, since I can remember) without some new update through my inbox on... Google, Facebook Advertising, Snapchat Stories, new entrant Periscope, the topic of Big Data!, permission and breaches, cookies, convergence, customer acquisition, integration, RTB, mobile, Panda, Penguin, penalties, optimisation, keywords , SEO, PPC, programmatic, Affiliates, retargeting, ad blocking,first party, third party data, eCRM, loyalty, advocacy, own media, earned media, bought media. Youtube, influencers, analytics, dashboards, automation, apps, opt in opt out, search, social, traffic, CTR's, OR's, CPM, CPC, CPA, LTV, OVP, AMC (agh). And then there is the world of Ad networks! .....The…
Which of these skills does the modern marketer need too?
Throughout this week we've been looking at the digital skills needed by marketers and found a large percentage of marketers roles is now taken up by managing digital activities. Here's a round-up of all our posts and new report on the level of digital marketing skills. This means marketers are starting to need many of the skills previously reserved for IT professionals. So we thought it would be interesting to see how the role of the IT professional has developed over the past 25 years, and where it is headed.
As Gen Y steps up to take centre stage in the employment pool, and technology increasingly dominates our life and work, it is predicted that there will be an 18% growth in tech jobs by 2022.
This infographic looks at how tech roles have evolved…
Help up build a picture of the current digital skills landscape
This infographic shows that there are 1.46 million people working in digital companies in the UK, with 45,000 more jobs in digital currently being advertised.
Digital marketing requires a huge breadth of skills, with some marketers specialising in key areas such as SEO, content marketing or Paid Search. Many however are generalists, who have a wide set of skills. This can be highly useful, but it is also tricky to keep all these skills up to date.
Some 5 million people globally work in digital marketing, and as the industry rapidly grows a skills gap is developing.
We’ve come up with a list of 20 skills that digital marketers may require, and…
How do your digital marketing skills compare?
Developing your Digital Marketing skills is now crucial to staying relevant in your career and, for employers too, 'digital talent development' is vital to stay competitive. Through our resources and blog articles we're keen to help members develop their skills and of those in their team. To help here, we will be grateful if you take our new Digital Skills research survey which will show which skills are most sought after and the best techniques to gain and develop your skills.
To develop this new research we have again teamed up with the organisers of the TFM&A and eCommerce Expo where the research will be presented - thanks for their input too - full details of the upcoming eCommerce Expo conference is available at the end of the survey.
We will let you know by email when the full report is published and available for…
Simon Swan interviews David Edmunson-Bird about teaching Digital Marketing in Higher Education
In this interview Simon Swan talked to David Edmunson-Bird about the opportunities and challenges of teaching Digital Marketing in Higher Education.
David, AKA @Groovegenerator, is a Principal Lecturer in Digital Marketing and Enterprise and Associate Director at Manchester Metropolitan University and has worked for leading companies including BT. He has been involved in the teaching and training of Digital Business since 2004 and was active in setting up the BA (Hons) in Digital Media/Marketing and MSc in Digital Marketing, some of the first and best regarded Digital Marketing qualifications in the UK.
Q1. MMU seem to have been an early adopter in grasping the opportunity to create recognised digital qualifications, do you see this as a necessary in helping to drive awareness for MMU and…
