• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, March 12, 2024

It may be a little too late to make a career shift. But marketers hoping to make the CMO leadership team should know that data skills are in high demand -- especially hard data skills, judging by Marketing Talent Trends: What CMOs Should Hire And Upskill Their Teams On, a study by Gartner based on an analysis of 300,000 job postings from 2020 to 2023. 

Of the job listings studied, 76% require data skills. This may be, in part, due to the fact that “Changing privacy regulations and low tech stack utilization disrupt marketers’ data collection efforts.” 

What are hard data skills? They are “tangible skills that indicate direct experience with analyzing data and/or using data tools (such as Tableau and data analytics).” In contrast, soft data skills are those entailing analysis — presumably, softer analysis. 

When hiring for CMO leadership teams, 59% seek hard-data skills. And only 41% look soft-data ones. 

Similarly, 52% hiring for other marketing roles demand hard-data expertise and 26% want soft-data skills. 

Demand for hard skills grew by 7% between 2020 and 2023, whereas soft-skill emphasis rose by only 3%. Another critical skill is cross-functional collaborations — with 46% of leadership team postings citing it.  

The reason may be that companies suffer from collaboration drag, which includes: 

- Employee exhaustion from collaboration meetings, tasks or processes 

- Unclear responsibilities 

- Slow decision making

In addition, demand is increasing for marketing roles with sales and PR overlap. There seem to be no listings at all for email marketers per se. 

But email does pop up in a posting for Sr. Content Strategists (IT Services and Consulting). The job description is: “Collaborate with content marketing team to ensure consistency of voice and tone across multiple communication mediums including but not limited to email, SMS, landing pages, AI chatbot and more.”

AI? Yes: "GenAI technology has disrupted marketing, introducing new uncertainty as CMOs seek to understand its use cases and risks,” the study notes.