Digital Industry's Leading Brands Unite to Define Standards and Tackle Growing Digital Skills Gap

The Digital Marketing Institute today announced the launch of its Syllabus Advisory Council, bringing together the digital industry's most respected voices to influence and validate the first formalised, professional syllabus for digital marketing.

With these developments, the Digital Marketing Institute aims to bridge the growing digital skills gap in Ireland by providing industry-ready, qualified marketers. A recent UPC study, conducted by Amarach, estimates the digital economy will produce some 150,000 new jobs by 2020.

Syllabus Advisory Council

The Digital Marketing Institute has brought together representatives from leading digital brands and agencies including Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Paypal, Ogilvy and RMG to review and validate course content, ensuring that students are graduating with the digital marketing skills and knowledge required by these industry powerhouses. Syllabus framework expert and Chairman of the CEN (European Committee for Standardisation) Workshop on ICT Skills, Dudley Dolan is chairing the Syllabus Advisory Council.

Advisory Council member, Martin Murray of Google says: “Working with advertisers and media agencies right across Europe, a common theme we hear again and again is that the under-availability of digital marketing competence is a barrier to growthacross all industries. This ongoing collaboration with the Digital Marketing Institute acknowledges the importance of defining the skills agenda in an ever-shifting industry to produce more competent and market-ready digital marketing professionals.”

First formalised professional syllabus

Alongside the introduction of the council, the Digital Marketing Institute has created the industry's first formalised, professional syllabus. Containing over 1,400 individual learning items, the validated syllabus combines the rigour of an academic course structure and certification with the flexibility of regular adjustments advised by the Syllabus Advisory Council to reflect the very latest industry knowledge.

Ian Dodson, Co-Founder and Director of the Digital Marketing Institute, explains: “Digital Marketing is a comparatively young industry, and its meteoric growth rate has left a gaping skills shortage. In a rush to up-skill, marketers have been let down by a lack of standardised, industry approved and accredited education programmes, and requirements businesses have been left without sufficiently skilled candidates to fill all the positions being created.

“In response, we have brought the industry's leading brands and agencies together to define exactly what skills today's digital marketing candidates need. The resulting syllabus is now being lectured across our programmes spanning 46 countries and producing an estimated 6,000 industry-ready candidates in 2014 alone.”

Digital marketing skills requirement

“As an agency, we are constantly on the lookout for top talent, and the industry led certification drive that Ian and his team have championed is a huge help in that regard. Candidates of all levels can now be distinguished between those who are ‘reaching' to a certain extent and those who have achieved actual ‘results'” says Mark Millard, Managing Director, RMG.

“As our job roles and company structure change with consumer expectations and technological advances, so do the requirements of new talent. Generation Y's technical ingenuity aside, they need to be multi-disciplined and be able to analyse data. We see the collaboration and partnership with DMI as innovators in educational learning as key to identifying new talent and as a benchmark to guide and nurture current staff through the constant evolution of technology and digital marketing practices,” says Suzanne Delaney, Head of Digital Ogilvy and Maher.

- ends -

Media Contact

• Bernice Burnside, Bvisible Communications, +353 1 845 2401 / +353 87 2337366 bernice@bvisible.ie

• Rachel Byrne, Digital Marketing Institute, +353 1 531 1200 / +353 87 1927236 rachelbyrne@digitalmarketinginstitute.com

About the Digital Marketing Institute

The Digital Marketing Institute is the global certification standard in digital marketing education, producing more graduates trained to a single digital marketing standard than any other certification body.

The Digital Marketing Institute works with global digital experts and leaders to define the skills and qualifications required by today's digital marketing professionals, certifying candidates to Diploma, Postgraduate and Masters levels all over the globe.

The Digital Marketing Institute now certifies digital professionals through the following channels:

• Online: Where students can study for certification directly with the Digital Marketing Institute through online learning

• Licence: Where the Digital Marketing Institute licences its syllabus to an approved third party organisation to teach the content on its behalf

• Corporate: Where the Digital Marketing Institute offers access to its learning library to enterprise level corporates and delivers tailored certification programmes