Mind the (talent) gap

Talk to anyone involved in digital marketing and pretty soon you’ll get onto the subject of talent, or rather the distinct lack of it. Publications like Wired and The Wall Street Journal have reported on the challenges faced by companies trying to find and retain good talent.  Most digital marketing-related surveys have resourcing as the number one challenge faced by companies in this sector. This, of course, leads to an inflation in wages where individuals with relatively little experience can charge a premium for their sought-after skillset.

As a full-service digital marketing agency, these are challenges we face every day. Not only are good people hard to find, but with such a small talent pool, they are also hard to keep. With the ever-increasing costs (in both time and money) related to growing our agency, we had to come up with a different approach to talent acquisition. A short while later, the Jellyfish Academy was born.

There is no shortage of intelligent, passionate, solution-oriented graduates leaving school, or who are a year into their first job looking for a new opportunity. What if we could take these individuals and teach them the skills they need to be successful digital marketing practitioners?

Essentially, the Academy is a three-month program we use to teach the fundamental principles of a specific digital marketing discipline. These currently cover paid search, analytics, client services and SEO with plans to extend to display and paid social.

What we’ve learned since launching the program in 2013:

1. Our most successful cohorts tend to be quite small, around four or five people. Any more than that and you can’t dedicate enough time to the development of each individual. Less than that and the group can’t help and support itself. We make it very clear that everyone is in it together. Everyone will learn different things at different speeds and by getting the class to think about supporting each other, they are also developing valuable team building skills.
2. Don’t underestimate the amount of time required to make this kind of initiative a success. As well as investing time in teaching, you will also need to provide consistent support throughout the three-month program. Don’t forget, for some individuals this may be their first ever work experience. When we first launched, we assigned two Jellyfish practitioners to cover everything, which took them both out of action for the duration of the course. In subsequent programs, we’ve been able to assign different people as mentors and instructors. By spreading the load of training and support amongst the team, we are much more time efficient.
3. Make new starters part of a team and give them live projects and clients to work on. Teach them to do something and get them to apply that learning to their client. With supervision from their mentor, this on-the-job experience really helps accelerate their learning and works better than endless days of theory. It also helps provide relevant context for the things they are learning.
4. Creating relationships with local colleges and universities has helped us bring some great talent into the Academy. Schools that implement the Google Online Marketing challenge https://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/ can be a particularly good source of potential candidates.
5. Finding the right candidates at graduate level, paying competitive market rates and providing excellent training has enabled us to build a highly motivated, cost effective team.

We’ve been running the Academy for over three years, and, as an example, +85% of our paid search team in the USA has qualified from the academy and the retention rates have been exceptional. While it doesn’t solve all of our talent acquisition challenges, it certainly helps build a strong resource foundation for our agency. Moreover, it means that we are playing a small part in helping to fill the digital marketing skills gap and ensuring the talent in our industry is the best it can be.

Follow them @JellyfishUS www.jellyfish.net