Our new research shows strong demand for Digital Skills

Latest survey indicates digital is popular with marketers yet a skills gap is apparent

For this research completed in July and August 2015 we teamed up with eCommerce Expo and TFM&A. We were pleased to get more than 1,00o responses (1028 to be precise), showing the interest in skills development that we had hoped for. In the research, we were looking to establish a picture of the current level of skills within the industry and generate a picture of how marketing professionals see their personal skills and those for their business right now. The results reveal some interesting trends regarding the future digital plans of digital marketers and the feelings of managers who are recruiting for digital marketing positions. If you happened to be one of the people who took the survey, then a big thank you to you!

Download resource – Developing Digital Skills 2015

This Research from Smart Insights, eCommerce Expo and Technology for Marketing and Advertising explores one of the key marketing challenges for businesses today: what skills are needed to compete using digital marketing? It's also highly relevant to individual career development for marketers too! It is free for basic and expert members.

Access the Developing Digital Skills 2015

 

Career plans

Digital marketing is clearly well liked by those who choose to make it their profession. And rightly so, where else could you find marketing assassins, SEO ninjas and Social Media junkies? The sillier job titles of our industry aside, our survey shows that a good chunk of digital marketers are looking to keep the 'digital' part of their title job. An impressive 69% plan on developing their current digital skills or moving to a more senior role whose focus remains on digital marketing. Slightly less than one in five wanted to move to a more general marketing or management role that wasn't explicitly digital as part of their career progression. Marketing itself is also clearly a popular profession given, none of our 1028 respondents plan on leaving the industry! A great endorsements of the field if there ever was one.

Recruiting for digital talent

Digital skills are highly sought after, and there is clear evidence for the existence of a skills gap, given over 50% of the people we surveyed rated recruiting for people with the appropriate digital skills as challenging or very challenging. That said, 22 people in our survey thought it was very easy - were they lucky or is there just something most don't know?!

What is interesting is both a majority of managers are reporting that recruiting for digital talent is hard, whilst a large chunk of digital marketers want to progress to more senior digital marketing roles. Clearly looking to train up staff to take on more senior digital marketing roles should me considered by all businesses large enough to put such a programme in place.

Digital Skills a necessity

We asked the 1,000 marketers that we surveyed how much of their time is spent managing digital marketing, as opposed to managing other, conventional marketing activities. The results show that digital is increasingly taking up a very large amount of marketers' roles, which in turn highlights the need for strong digital skills. More marketers reported spending 81-100% of their time on digital activities than any other option on our survey. Across all respondents, the average time spent on digital marketing activities was 60%. Digital has thus overtaken conventional marketing activities in terms of time spent by marketers, and this trend is set to continue, so digital skills will only become more important. That said, we promoted our survey via email and blogging, which may lead to a certain bias towards digital in the results.

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