Digital Marketing Skills in High Demand:Exploratory Study of Multiple Competencies for a Marketing Professional

Abstract

In recent years, there has been growing interest in studying digital marketing education. Prior research approaches marketing education from the perspective of change and challenges. Digitalization causes changes in pedagogy and curriculum design and creates challenges for educators and students to stay up to date. What is not well understood is what employers demand for digital marketing skills. The purpose of this article is to explore marketing education and especially the challenges from a multifaceted perspective of students, teachers and marketing professionals working in business. The qualitative data consists of fourteen open theme interviews with marketing professionals from different industries, four in-depth interviews of marketing teachers and two focus group interviews with teachers, and two focus group interviews with students. We have identified six different challenges that contemporary marketing practices pose in business, marketing education and learning. We describe these challenges as opposing themes that represent broad skills needed in the marketing profession. In addition, the opposing themes contribute to explain why the marketing field is so challenging. This study contributes to the marketing education literature by providing a deeper understanding of the marketing field for curriculum development. Keywords: digital marketing, marketing education, marketing capability, marketing career, marketing skills gap