In 2019, the American Marketing Association through their periodical Marketing News published an article called “The Market for Marketers: Hiring and Salary Trends.” This article, written by Diane Domeyer of The Creative Group who specializes in staffing for creative, digital, marketing, advertising, and public relations positions, reviewed the latest trends across the marketing industry and current economic conditions. Their takeaway was that U.S. employers are eager to hire professionals with both soft and hard skills that can contribute to their customer experience and digital marketing initiatives.
The in-demand skills set includes both soft and hard skills. As for the hard skills, The Creative Group finds that 71% of the current marketing candidates lack up-to-date digital skills, including a deficit in data science and analysis, web and user experience design, content creation and marketing, and SEO or search engine (ppc) marketing. They highly recommend that digital savvy job seekers emphasize this on their resumes and LinkedIn profiles. Hiring managers especially want to see a connection between the day-to-day responsibilities, the firm’s bottom line, and a desire for job seekers to want to keep up with the latest in marketing trends and best practices.
As for soft skills, employers still greatly value written and verbal communication expertise, collaboration ability, client relations experience, and showing a positive attitude. Especially when considering creative roles, The Creative Group reports that 23% of advertising and marketing executives sill weigh these soft skills more heavily than hard skills. These particular managers look for dependability, empathy, innovative thinking, and problem-solving abilities first, and then will provide on-the-job training to fill in the skill gaps.
Finally, businesses faced an unemployment rate at or under 4% from 2018-2019, with around 2% for college-degreed workers who are 25 years or older. Results indicate that it is even lower for marketing roles. Needless to say, within the current hiring environment, there is an all-time shortage of talent. Therefore, employers are having to use a variety of staffing strategies to find the best talent, including speeding up the hiring process, providing more on-the-job training, and relying on freelancers or consultants for specialized expertise for project-based work to evaluate talent. Furthermore, employers are having to provide today’s job seekers with additional perks, like flexible schedules, remote work options, wellness packages, meal allowances, and sign-on bonuses in order to compete. This market requires employers to compete on both salary and benefits to keep and retain the best talent. The war for skilled workers is not expected to end in the foreseeable future.
All of these current hiring and salary trends emphasize the importance of college students gaining both the hard and soft skills needed for the current marketplace. Marketing curriculum for many years have focused to help students in the soft skills area, but unfortunately, the hard skills, especially in the digital space have been a deficit in the marketing curriculum for some time. This is where The Social Media Magnet comes into play. If you haven’t been tuning into our student stories, then you may have missed student after student talking about how our curriculum has developed their skill set which has afforded them the opportunity to get that internship or job that they have been desiring. Over the next few weeks, we will be highlighting our summer career stories that include more and more of these job placement successes. We are teaching those hard skill sets that employers crave, and you can too.
If you are a college professor and are not familiar with The Social Media Magnet, please watch our 28-Minute Webinar explaining what we do. If you are interested in considering The Social Media Magnet for your university, we have a professor preview function that will allow you to see and work with some of the content. If you are already in preview, which many of you are, and you are ready to commit to using our curriculum in your next semester’s class, then fill out our Commitment Form to get on-boarded and prepped for your next class. Or if you just have some general questions, feel free to contact us. We would love to assist you however possible.
References:
Marketing News. The Market for Marketers: Hiring and Salary Trends. Last accessed 6.14.19.