Imagine you’re trying to enter a fast growing, high-tech profession with huge career growth opportunity. But there are no standards, no formalized training, the industry requires 3-5 years of experience to even get a start, and you can find little guidance on how to effectively navigate your career. Welcome to the world of modern marketing!
The marketing function has been overwhelmed with a tsunami of over 5,000 different marketing technology solutions. This year global digital ad spend at $107 billion is surpassing traditional. To be effective, marketers must understand data, analytics, code, automation, and mobile. In the past 10 years, marketers have witnessed more change than the past 500 years combined. From a technical skills perspective, we are grossly underprepared to deal with such velocity of change, demonstrated by the fact that the lack of skilled talent is the #1 concern for CEOs.
A Historic Day
Today we are announcing the first DOL Registered Digital Marketing Apprenticeship in the nation. For the first time, businesses have a powerful tool recognized by the Department of Labor for growing their own marketing superheroes!
The path to a Registered Apprenticeship has certainly not been easy and has taken our team over 3 years. It started with 100s of industry partner conversations, instructional design, curriculum development, and continuous optimization of our program. To even begin the registration process we had to first get digital marketing recognized as a profession with its own DOL O’Net Code. I’m extremely grateful for the tenacious persistence of our team to move past these hurdles and achieve something so impactful and historic for our state and our nation!
Digital Apprenticeships Will Transform Lives
Registered apprenticeships have been proven to result in over $300K additional lifetime value for apprentices. Because of the intense demand for digital skills and the rapid career advancement opportunities within the field, we anticipate that apprenticeships in digital will far surpass this amount.
I’m often asked, why we chose within digital to focus first on launching a digital marketing apprenticeship. Although it is a fun and challenging space that I personally really enjoy, in many ways it is where the talent shortage is most acute. San Antonio and Austin tech leaders have shared with me their perspective that finding software developers is much easier than skilled digital marketing talent. It truly is a unique blend of strategy, marketing, and technical skills that are required to excel in the field. Few people understand it and even fewer people can break into it. So when we asked where can we make the greatest difference, digital marketing was the obvious choice.
The Digital Creative Institute Experience
Our project-based curriculum allows apprentices to acquire hands-on experience by implementing mission critical campaigns for their employers. Learning technical skills is important, however, performance coaching is our secret to producing greatness. It’s what truly makes this an apprenticeship experience.
Each apprentice has a Performance Coach to support them in working directly with their manager to set goals and support the attainment of those goals. This kind of coaching has demonstrated a tangible ROI of 3.5X to 5X. It’s where we see transformation take place.
And that’s what inspires our team. Our mission is to “partner with employers in transforming lives by bridging the gap between what schools teach and what only experience can bring.” Every other form of education starts with a bottom-up approach that starts by asking “what can schools deliver?” These schools then build programs and tell businesses that they should hire their graduates. However, our approach is to first partner with the employer, figure out what is most important to that company, and then deliver a customized learning experience tailored to their marketing needs.
Now as a DOL Registered apprenticeship we are uniquely prepared to deliver this customized value to our partners. If you are looking to accelerate the growth and capabilities of your marketing team while ensuring that you are retaining the best, please reach out to us to discuss how we might partner to achieve better results for your marketing team.
