skills

Mind the Gap: Avoiding a Social Media Skills Crisis

This session will explore the digital industry’s seemingly insatiable appetite for social media skills. But where are the skills coming from? Academia? On-the-job learning? Is social media baked into the DNA of the digital natives? And are they needed for specific social media roles or will the social media purist become a thing of the past?

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Date: 13 February 2012
Location: Design Council, UK

A Day in the Life of a Social Media Manager

I've noticed a steady increase in the number of roles on Chinwag Jobs that mention "social media" or "community" in the title. But what's it like to do the job? In this guest post, Rebecca Jesson, Social Media Manager at Sheffield-based agency, Quba shares her day...

One of the questions I get asked frequently is “What exactly does a Social Media Manager do?” As Kat French so rightly puts it “…because apparently, people think social media managers spend all day on Twitter/Facebook collecting followers and congratulating each other on getting paid to spend all day on Twitter/Facebook”. Her “day in the life of…” post covers a lot of the things I do all day, but I wanted to write one of my own. So here it goes...

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Digital skills shortage: pure economics?

At Chinwag we’ve been chatting about the skills shortage in digital for some time. We did a survey on the topic too at the end of 2007 to find out exactly how digital was faring. The results were quite worrying.

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Channel 4 marries learning with social media


Channel 4’s promise? To strengthen their connection with young audiences by embracing mulitple platforms and devoting £6 million of their budget to higher risk projects.

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SXSW Interactive 08 panel - The 10 Commandments of Nice

On 9th March I swung by the session hosted by the Preloaded guys. Ten Commandments? The sheer (tongue-in) cheek of it intrigued me...

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Dotbomb talent purge casts a long shadow

2004-2008 A Partial Potted (UK) Web Media History:

Code orange alert: 2004. Sector has stabilised. Huge relief. Optimism. Hiring people. 2005. Excitement. Clients pupils are dilating... Upswing! Much client business incoming. Broadband upsurge. Money flooding into interactive advertising.

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Finding & Attracting Talent

As I mentioned before, talent is very hard to find these days and getting harder.  You may be looking for months for that perfect candidate so what do you do to ensure that you find it and then you attract and engage it? 

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Designers don’t think?

Chatting to a recruiter recently I was shocked to hear him say, ‘The problem is we’re interviewing a lot of designers at the moment who don’t think’. I was pretty dumbfounded, as I’ve spent my entire working life believing that is exactly what designers did. However, it did get me thinking more about the way designers in technology work, the way things have changed over the last ten or so years, and the problems that they face.

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Digital Skills Drought?

We've just put out a survey on Chinwag Jobs to guage what's happening in the recruitment sector. It'll be interesting to get feedback on the problems (or perhaps not) of recruiting and retaining digital people over the last year.

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