The Talent Gap
- 22% of respondents say the need for digital marketing specialists is growing.
- Of greatest need are specialists in analytics, email, content marketing, mobile marketing, and social media.
- In all of those areas, there is a significant gap between how important executives believe the skill-sets are and the perceived talent level of their teams:
Finding Talent
- 40% of respondents are not able to find sufficient talent to handle their digital marketing workloads.
- 70% of large enterprises and 75% of agencies say referrals from professionals are more helpful than the other resources they use to find talent.
- 36% say students just out of school do not yet have the real-life experience required for their open positions.
- 70% of large enterprise respondents and 72% from agencies say young employees have a sense of entitlement and expect to advance or be hired for upper-level positions before proving themselves.
Verifying and Building Skills
- Just 32% of respondents are satisfied with their company’s efforts at assessing new digital marketing hires.
- 30% of large companies and 24% of agencies say they are unable to adequately distinguish between those with the right digital marketing skills and those without.
- 83% of agencies include training in their orientation programs. However, just 32% test to measure skill acquisition.
- 28% of large enterprises and 39% of agencies plan to introduce formal training programs to improve digital marketing skills.
