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If I were to ask you what the main topics keeping you or your senior leaders up at night were, what would they be? Right now, topics like profitability, cost-of-living pressures and consumer confidence might be high on the list, and AI and data privacy probably feature prominently, too. But I\u2019m willing to wager that people or skills challenges also come pretty high up the list. I know this because for years I was running thought leadership projects at the Australian Centre for Retail Studies, and for years we\u2019d ask members what topics we should cover, and each year without fail, the \u2018War for Talent\u2019 would be one of the top suggestions. No matter how many times we reported on the challenges of attracting staff into retail as a career path rather than just a temporary job, we\u2019d still get asked for more.<\/p>\n
While these challenges might persist, I\u2019ve certainly noticed a changing perception around the prospect of retail careers, led by some amazing industry leaders and increasing formal education opportunities in the industry. Based on my sample \u2013 my RMIT students \u2013 retailers and brands that have positioned themselves to appeal to younger generations\u2019 search for value-aligned work have become particularly desired. Yet just as the retail industry has started making ground in one Talent War, another one is coming: the War for MarTech skills.<\/p>\n
MarTech skills: critical for retailers, but hard to find<\/h2>\n
Why is this latest Talent War specifically about MarTech skills? A few reasons. First, MarTech helps retailers do better marketing; it helps with finding, attracting, and engaging with customers, creating and scaling campaigns, measuring effectiveness, and so on. In an increasingly competitive industry it can be the difference between profitability and growth, or quickly falling behind.<\/p>\n
Second, it\u2019s an extremely fast-moving space. The latest MarTech Landscape lists over 14,000 different MarTech solutions, growth of nearly 30 per cent in a year, and over double where the industry was just five years ago. Expertise in what all these tools are, and how they fit together, is pretty critical.<\/p>\n
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there are critical skills gaps in MarTech. Not just in retail, everywhere. Only 28 per cent of businesses feel they have adequate in-house MarTech skills, while 74 per cent say their skills gap is critical. The impact is that despite organisations having invested in literally hundreds of MarTech tools, they use only around a third of them. Why? No one knows how to use them.<\/p>\n
I heard this consistently while interviewing C-suite marketers for a white paper I co-authored on the challenges of MarTech. One CMO described the scarcity of MarTech skills as an \u201cabsolute pain point for not just me, but probably every CMO in the country\u201d, and it got worse. Even after finding these people with MarTech skills, it\u2019s hard to keep them. \u201c We tend to take on more junior people, we train them up, but then of course, they get picked off and it happens all the time,\u201d the CMO said.<\/p>\n
So what can retailers do about it? I\u2019m going to propose two inter-related strategies: creating a formal pathway into these roles, then making them fun.<\/p>\n
1. Create a pathway<\/h3>\n
The MarTech World Forum was recently held in Melbourne. Multiple speakers (including me) spoke about the lack of pathways into MarTech, driven by a lack of formal education opportunities. Most people working in MarTech roles didn\u2019t set out to be MarTech professionals, they fell into it. Some started in marketing and gradually picked up technical skills, others came from technical domains and developed marketing knowledge along the way.<\/p>\n
This \u2018falling in\u2019 was true for retail for many years and may still be for many roles. Yet retail has made strides in addressing this through the now numerous formal education pathways \u2013 not just for shop-floor staff but also for head-office leaders. The good news is, the same is coming for MarTech skills. I\u2019m fortunate at RMIT to be leading the development of brand new MarTech courses, including one of the first MarTech majors for undergraduates in the world.<\/p>\n
But having the education pathway is only half the battle. People have to want to pursue that pathway in the first place. This is where the focus needs to shift from the technical aspects to something more fundamental \u2013 joy.<\/p>\n
2. Spread the joy<\/h3>\n
I mentioned the recent MarTech World Forum and how I spoke on MarTech\u2019s pathway problem. The title of my topic was \u2018Where\u2019s the Joy?\u2019, with a plea to attendees to focus less on the \u2018tech\u2019 of MarTech and more on the human aspects. This might seem counterintuitive.<\/p>\n
Isn\u2019t MarTech all about automation, efficiency and data? But that\u2019s precisely the issue. We\u2019ve been so focused on the technology that we\u2019ve forgotten about the humans who need to implement and use it. And humans, it turns out, perform better when they enjoy what they\u2019re doing and feeling personally involved.<\/p>\n
This concept of psychological ownership is particularly important. We engage more deeply and find more satisfaction when we feel like we own our work outputs. This is one of the challenges of technology, automation and even AI. If the tech does the work for you, what do the humans contribute and own?<\/p>\n
The great news is that retail has plenty of opportunities for joy and psychological ownership. Look no further than the Retailer Awards. Everyone there, from head office, to store managers, to customer-service staff, exhibited such genuine pride in what they had created. They weren\u2019t just implementing automated, optimised or efficient solutions, they were creating joy for customers and themselves.<\/p>\n
Filling the tech gap with joy<\/h2>\n
Like any war, Retail’s War for Talent 2.0 won\u2019t be won overnight. I\u2019m not proposing that making MarTech roles for retailers sound fun will magically fill these skills gaps. What I am saying is that while formal education in MarTech is emerging to fill the skills gap, retailers can set themselves up to be the employers of choice by focusing not on the tech, but on the joy it can create.<\/p>\n
The post The war for talent continued: How retailers can win and keep MarTech talent appeared first on Inside Retail Australia.<\/p>\n