What skills are needed in this digital world?

I’ve just came back from an eye-opening event organized by Hays called “Elements of a Marketer - Skills for a Digital World”. It was a presentation and panel discussion based on a marketing skills report run by Hays.

The market is changing, any experienced marketing manager or HR professional can see it. The change is not only on the amount of up-to-date specific technical knowledge that it is needed for each team member to create the right team to deliver the results needed.

Claire Kemsley, Managing Director for Hays explained that the evolution of digital technology has created an inevitable skills gap where companies are targeting more junior technically skilled marketing professionals across a range of functions…and that has its downsides.

She presented a summary of a report that provides insight into the core skills should prioritise, no matter what the role.

The most highly sought after core skills identified by today’s leading marketing executives are:

1. Analytical
2. Copywriting
3. Creativity
4. Customer-centric
5. Project management

She also showed some statistics that makes sense and some that were pretty shocking. For example, junior roles are lacking the skills:

• Commercial awareness (31%)
• Sector experience (15%)
• Analytical/data interpretation (10%)

These make sense because they came mainly by experience, by having seen patterns and issues in the past. People like me, with more than 15 years in digital marketing, looking at many companies Google Analytics graphs, can identify issues, interpret data and see patterns that I imagine for a graduate could pass without notice.

Commercial awareness was something that we discussed with the panel. Where is the knowledge of brand perception and the impact of price? A bad brand management on social media can destroy a brand in seconds. These are the concepts that are part of the commercial awareness, that a degree could help to understand and open the eyes to know how to do it, sharing experience, internal training could do the work too.

The skill statistics that strike me the most are the middle management. According to the research done, the top core skills where there is a significant skills gap are:

• Strategic thinking (17%)
• Analytical/data interpretation (14%)
• Creativity (12%)

The explanation is: as marketing professionals advance from more junior roles into middle management the gap in strategy development is typically and inevitably a common pitfall. Junior marketers evolve by focusing on becoming experts at delivery instead of understanding and creating the strategy behind their actions.

I have seen that many times, and in my experience, it feels that we need to stop the train, the inertia of getting submerged into one campaign after the other and start thinking about what are the company objectives, who is the target market, what are the channels where this target market is, what are the right conversions points and how are we going to measure them. Without doing that exercise, we can be in the middle of the campaign realising we are not measuring the conversions on the call to actions and it is too late to make the changes….and we just missed the opportunity to measure the ROI.

Networking before and after the conference and panel was really good, great opportunities to work together.

I look forward to participating in the next Hays event.