Dive Brief:
- A group of high-profile companies will join General Assembly (GA) members to define digital-marketing skills. Google, L'Oréal and Priceline are a few of the major employers who teamed up with GA to form the employer-led Digital Marketing Standards Board to make digital marketing jobs more accessible and transparent.
- According to statistics on digital marketing careers, the number of job postings has almost doubled in the past five years. Around 40% of marketing-job openings seek candidates with digital skills, and digital marketing jobs take 16% longer to fill than traditional jobs in marketing.
- The standards board will publish skill maps to uncover career pathways and better define the competencies that will lead to success in a plan to expand the talent pool and increase candidate diversity.
Dive Insight:
Partnerships between business leaders and lawmakers can improve career prospects and the hiring potential of many more workers. The formation of an employer-led board could lead to success in both preparing workers for future digital jobs (in this case, marketing) and providing a way for employers to find the right talent with the skills needed for success.
Not all jobs require a four-year degree. More industries are considering a restructure of the skills definition so that candidates with some level of training outside of 4-year college degrees, perhaps through certification, can work successfully in the field. "Degree inflation," or requiring degrees for mid-level jobs, has limited opportunities in some industries for skilled workers. As more employers voice their concerns about the skills gap, more will likely need to look beyond degrees for talent, especially as "bootcamps" akin to General Assembly push out more trained workers.
