With budgets for 2025 set, marketing leaders face a familiar challenge: limited resources and growing skills gaps. With the intense competition for specialized talent, the solution may be in embracing a training culture. This will close critical skills gaps and drive long-term success.

Why talent gaps are a major threat to marketing success

Ed Gordon, author of “Winning the Global Talent Showdown,” observed: 

“You can have all the latest technology you want, but if you don’t have the talent behind it, your business is not sustainable.” 

In the 2024 Randstad Enterprise Talent Trends Research report, marketing and creative leaders named their top two challenges as:

• Increased competition for hard-to-find skills (34%).
• Growing scarcity of specialized skills (32%).

The skills gap threatens the sustainability of businesses worldwide. Data and analytics is the biggest gap in marketing departments, per Marketing Week’s 2023 Career and Salary Survey. There’s also a gap in soft skills like communication and leadership. As skill gaps in marketing grow, demand is outpacing the supply of qualified talent.

Dig deeper: Why your marketing team needs training, not just tech, in the age of AI

Cultivating the right mindset: Cost vs. value

Here’s the good news. Skills-based organizations are:

• 79% more likely to provide a positive workforce experience for their staff. 
• 63% are more likely to achieve results than those without a skills-based approach.

The bad news? There are significant impacts to inefficiencies when organizations must replace talent. The cost of replacing one employee can be up to twice the employee’s annual salary. The average empty role remains open for more than two months. By contrast, training someone up costs around $5,000.

A skills-based workforce requires alignment across the entire organization — leadership, managers and employees. Everyone must understand re-training and training up can drive success. Fostering a culture that builds skills is a better long-term solution than trying to hire from the small number of skilled people.

Many organizations are role-based, focusing on jobs, titles and functional responsibilities, with hiring managers prioritizing qualifications and years of experience. In contrast, a skills-based culture emphasizes an individual’s full range of skills, capabilities and motivations. It looks at how those can be applied across different roles or projects to achieve organizational goals. By adopting a skills-based strategy, companies focus on potential rather than just experience and hard skills.

The benefits of this culture include:

• Increased resilience.
• Greater competitiveness in the marketplace.
• Higher talent retention.
• Enhanced profitability and productivity.
• Preserved corporate culture.

However, overcoming the barriers to the role-based mindset is often the greatest challenge.

Developing a skills-based workforce with upskilling

Only 33% of organizations have internal mobility programs. This explains why only 20% if employees feel confident about making an internal move. This is a big hinderance to staff development and a growth mindset.

Shifting from role-based to a skills-based requires significant effort and investment. Developing a common language around skills, implementing tools like Learning Management Systems and providing the necessary resources won’t happen overnight. However, there are steps you can take now:

Prioritize on-the-job training 

• Build time into annual planning for skill development. Specify the expectation of time to be spent on training and development. This means setting a percent or total time that each level (manager, associate, etc.) and role type (people manager, individual contributor, etc.) is expected to spend in training and development. Use this logic to plan your department’s capacity. 
• Start small with mentorship programs. Provide unique training opportunities based on specific skills required. Focus on a few skill sets at a time to increase change management success. Consider starting with human-machine interaction that all can utilize (e.g., prompt engineering training).
• Explore cost-effective personalized learning options. For example, LinkedIn Learning has shown positive career outcomes for 70% of users.

Encourage a culture of continuous improvement 

• Create the narrative of skilling as an investment, not an expense. Build organizational context around the importance of skilling at all levels.
• Monitor time spent on upskilling efforts, track against planned expectations and socialize progress and wins. 
• Provide employees practical opportunities to apply and expand on what they have learned. Identify projects or expose them to cross-functional teams working on similar skills. Consider having them lead sessions on the training or skills they have developed. 
• Measure successes. Develop KPIs that show the value the new skills are bringing to the company. Metrics like employee engagement, turnover rates, skills gained and promotion rates will assist in planning resources for next year.

Dig deeper: Building your generative AI marketing skillset: Training and upskilling

Upskilling: The key to overcoming marketing skills gaps

The reality is that you will rarely get the headcount you request. Even if you do, recruitment might not provide the quick solution you expect. To reach our goals, we need to focus on developing the skills of our existing talent. The sooner we take steps to support this effort, the sooner we’ll succeed.

It’s crucial for marketing leaders to be involved in defining the skills you will need and assessing the ones you already have. Work closely with HR to ensure marketing’s specific talent needs are understood and addressed in both retention and recruitment strategies.