• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, September 2, 2016

Talk with any executive at MediaPost’s Programmatic Insider Summit last week, and the concerns were the same: “We need more skilled talent and expertise.” Whether you work for an ad tech or martech company, an agency, brand marketer, trading desk, demand-side platform, supply-side platform, data management platform, or native advertising platform, if you’re a manager, you’re looking for talent.

You’re probably looking for audience segmentation specialists, data scientists, business analysts, yield specialists, data mining and analytics specialists, audience optimization experts, and folks filling other roles that have yet to be defined. You’re looking for hybrids: people who are creative problem-solvers and not afraid to get their hands dirty inside multiple dashboards and spreadsheets. They’re not afraid to pull the levers in real-time. They’ve had a bit of experience, but maybe they don’t have any in a particular specialty—will you train them?

Take a look at any of the job listings and you’ll see companies straining to recruit and retain the right kind of talent. The needs are evolving, so who you hire today may need to morph into someone else in a month.

A look at AdExchanger’s daily job listings reveals only a sampling of what’s available. There are often more than 20 postings highlighted in the daily newsletter—all highly technical.

Making sure employees acquire skills across different parts of the organization is key. The best companies do this. Why would you keep someone on one team for more than a year in a rapidly evolving landscape with needs and requirements that change daily? Savvy companies will have a plan. They’ll experiment. Those experiments won’t always work, but people need to be moved around and trained.

In a recent Smith & Beta report on talent and talent development, agency employees were asked to anonymously rate their own ability in a variety of digital skills, and 55% of them said their experience in mobile ad strategy was "novice" or even lower. Half of all respondents said the same of their data analytics and KPI skills, as well as their production expertise.

The report found that 65% of respondents described their prototyping skills "novice,” while 33% said the same about their ability with cross-platform storytelling, 34% for content strategy, and 47% for user experience. Overall, a large portion of employees ranked their digital skills as lacking, with 43% saying they didn’t feel prepared to handle the kind of work that will be expected of people in the industry in the future.

Allison Kent-Smith, founder of Smith & Beta, the talent development firm that conducted the report, placed the blame on a misguided belief among agencies that technically capable workers are hired, not made.   

"Agencies continue to invest in acquiring talent vs. developing talent," she said. "The surprising thing is that there’s not more investment in the people that walk in the doors every day."

The survey suggested that agency employees frequently rely on sources other than their employers to learn how to do their jobs. In fact, 32% of respondents said they learned helpful job skills on their own or from friends or peers. Another 23% relied on blogs, books or online resources. Only 9% said management imparted those skills, and another 9% relied on events or conferences. "Education’s not formal, it’s not part of work. It’s something that happens in the margins," Kent-Smith said.

Part of the problem is that agencies—like other companies—typically look to hire "experts" for their technical positions, and then expect those skills to spread throughout the company organically, said Kent-Smith. But without opportunities to share their expertise with co-workers, these skilled workers can perform their jobs without ever sharing their knowledge. Then, either through burnout, boredom or brain drain, those people move on, and the agency is no better off than when it started.

Kent-Smith advocates a "distributed knowledge" model. Instead of hiring  five experts, an agency can hire one or two and then train people already working at the agency.