skills

Got some data chops? Job hunting in 2014? Looks like it's going to be a good year for you according to recent data from OMI. Across the industry, marketers said that the biggest skills gap in their organisation was analytics with mobile marketing in second place.

In agency-land the talent gap for those with mobile skills was even starker with a 43% talent gap with analytics coming in at 30%. For recruiters and HR professionals this tells a story that's already familiar with organisations hard-pressed to find these skills.

As this year's Social Media Week London kicks off next week (13-17th Feb), I asked Lauren to scan the 150+ events that make up the schedule with an eagle-eye for events focusing on recruitment, careers, skills and social media.

She found some corkers, which are listed below, the majority of which are free to attend. The full schedule has an enormous variety of events covering subjects from Freedom of Tweet: Censorship, Government, Marketers and the Law (Tues 14th Feb, 1 - 5pm @ Design Coucil) to Collaborating on Cancer (Weds 15th Feb, 2 - 3.30pm @ City Hall).

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...

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

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.

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? 

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.