Workplace Mergers: IT & Marketing Join Forces

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In a discouraging economic climate, passion jobs are hard to come by. For tech wizards, the opposite is true. The demand for technical talent is high and the unemployment rate in information technology is shockingly low, with numbers below 4%.New and cutting-edge technology is largely responsible for the high demand for skilled IT professionals but there is something else pushing the train ahead.

Researchers are seeing a tremendous amount of demand for IT professionals within marketing departments. Staffing firms report marketing companies to be some of the most profitable clients. Marketing departments, however, cannot fully integrate themselves with technology and remain truly consistent and effective.

Marketing and non-technical management groups are being handed the ability to build their own team from within. A large portion of new technologies that are getting implemented in marketing are cloud-based so departments are seeking skills related to fulfilling those business agendas. Staffing agencies have taken off to try to meet these bulk demands for skilled professionals and are interacting with non-technical managers to build technical teams. At the top of the earning list of desirable hires are business analysts, user interface experts, data analysts, and project managers. Application programmers and web developers with high technical skills and an understanding of the latest mobile and web technology are in even higher demand.

Because companies are revamping their financial budgets, marketing departments are getting more money than they did a year ago, especially when the departments scaled back or were eliminated altogether. Now, marketing managers have the authority the ability and the funds to hire top talent in IT to give their marketing department a creative edge.

With so many aspects of marketing from web to mobile to the cloud, technology experts are crucial to executing collaborative, web-based marketing campaigns. As a result, responsive design will increase in popularity, in turn, increasing technical demand as more users are viewing information from smartphones than from computers. Responsive design is not new, but newly important to technology departments. The essence of this design trend is the condensing and formatting of content and graphics to appear cohesive from a smartphone, tablet, laptop or computer. Because this design technique is increasing in demand, many certification courses will begin to offer training in this specific area. This is just one example of specialization. Ideally, it is much more beneficial to specialize and become an expert than to generalize with a degree in a broad category. Specification is a key aspect in branding yourself in a competitive IT market.

So why is this important? In order to gain these skills and apply for positions that will increase your earning potential dramatically it requires learning, training and studying, not necessarily in that order. Online learning and specialty certifications are ideal for building on technical knowledge while learning the missing parts that are discovered every day.