Digital Marketing Talent Crisis

There is a Digital Talent Crisis happening according to a recent article by Shane Steele of Yahoo.  Shane discusses if the media and advertising industry is going to fully recover and grow in the future we must invest in talent. That begs the question, where is the talent coming from, particularly with the skills and experience needed to keep up with the radical pace of change in the digital age?

There is new digital education program called Boulder Digital Works (http://bdw.colorado.edu), a school with the ambition to produce the world’s best digital creative, business, and technology talent. BDW was formed by the University of Colorado in partnership with MDC Partners, Microsoft, and a number of other companies to address what its founders saw as a pressing need for digital talent and leadership in their own businesses. Their goal – build a digital boot camp to groom educated workers and leaders who move comfortably and intelligently across the disciplines of technology, creative, and business.

Upon reviewing job posting for digital marketing positions the confusion also lies with hiring agencies, managers and companies.  Digital marketing evolves daily with new technologies and transformations including how customers/prospects utilize and adopt the technologies.  Example would be that of eCommerce how years ago people were skeptical and did not trust this process.  Well, times have changed and the numbers of online sales continues to rise. 

Do current digital marketing professionals know how to build trust, create navigation that leads customers to conversion, or how to even drive customers to their sites and so on...

According to BDW they refer to this type of talent profile as “T-Shaped Talent,” or an “Integrated Digital Thinker.” It means that no matter what your specialty (base of the T), be it copywriting, media planning or flash design, in order to be most effective in the workplace today, employees must complement their subject matter expertise with a broad and holistic understanding of how digital technology impacts their business (top of the T). In other words, today’s talent must be fluent in at least one language but also literate in many.