Skillset Blog

Yes, there is a skills shortage.  That is undeniable.  Industry is feeling the pinch.

In the digital agency / digital marketing sector I was very lucky to have the opportunity to speak with a couple of hundred industry bods last week at the Chinwag Skills Emergency event to discuss what interventions could be put in place long term and short term.  Some of the issues:

Clients fed up because its a freelancers market and why should they invest in outside transient expertise.  Freelancers fed up because they do not get training support from their client.  Companies too busy to invest in recruitment themselves and recruitment agencies cant find the right people with the right skills for the right job, in turn both companies and recruitment agencies lock horns.  Lack of business and management skills are further complicating the picture.

The major issue here is that unlike the other sectors represented by Skillset (as I feel we do cover some of the Digital Agency territory), the market is dominated by recruitment agencies which creates a very strange economy.  And recruitment agencies in the digital marketing sector are feeling the pinch maybe more than anyone. 

Yes there is a skills shortage but its not new and the driving factors vary from industry to industry, though some core transferable skills are in short supply across the piece.  Perhaps its the impact of a rapidly changing business environment, across industry, which is now starting to bite.  Whether its interactive independents struggling to take up the new opportunities of multi platform or the explosion of recruitment through social networking sites, theres a whole lot of change out there and not enough skills in house to cope with the pressure to expand or change .

But back to the holy grail - what could be the quick fire solutions for those already in the workforce? More investment in peer to peer skills swapping within and across companies?  Online peer to peer mentoring in transferable skills such as business management?  Comments to this blog show salary is an issue in facilities, not enough collaboration between industry and academia and poor sector profiles are all part of the mix.

One thing for sure is Sector Skills Councils do need to build closer relationships with the mighty force of the recruitment world, who are at the coal face of the skills business, who at a glance can report and predict the immediate and short term skills requirements and who sit, balancing the scales, between business and the workforce.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Facilities, Interactive, Skillset. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but we reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.