I’ve been reading a lot of articles about the lack of talented people willing or able to work in the fast changing advertising business these days.
Here’s one point of view from The New York Times:
A talent gap is growing between the skills that many new advertising jobs require and the number of people who have those skills. The dilemma is particularly acute for jobs that require hard-core quantitative, mathematical and technical skills.
The talent pool, advertising technology company executives say, is not a deep one. And those who have the skills are in high demand, often fetching annual salaries that can reach $100,000.
Erika Weinstein, president of the executive recruitment firm Stephen-Bradford Search, said many companies are looking for “a five-headed monster,” focusing on creative and highly technical skills and a strong business acumen.
For more on the need for highly specialized people, take a look at Khoi Vinh’s recent piece on the need for editorial experience designers:
…we’re leaving an era where design operates in the narrative mode, in which its fundamental purpose is to create canonical, highly controlled visual stories. We’re now in an era — the digital era — where the new paradigm is designing for behavior: creating stateful systems that are responsive to user inputs and environmental inputs, where presentation is not just separated from content, but where presentation is volatile and continually changing by nature.
There we have it. The future is “designing for behavior.” Yet, how many of us even know what that means?
