Why Companies Are Creating Their Own Digital Marketing Skills Shortage

James Congdon

7 hours ago

There is a version of the digital marketing skills shortage story that employers across agencies, in-house marketing teams and other digital businesses tell about themselves, and it goes something like this: the talent pool is shallow, good people are hard to find, and the industry simply isn’t producing enough experienced practitioners to meet demand.

It is a convenient story. It is also, in large part, wrong.

The uncomfortable reality is that some organisations’ operating models may be helping to create the shortage they now face. Years of prioritising efficiency, narrow specialisation and organisational structures that insulate specialists from the commercial realities of the business have all played a role.

The talent pool may be shallow. The more useful question is why.

A Market In Transition

IAB Australia’s 2026 Digital Advertising & Ad Tech Talent Review provides useful context for what is happening across the wider Australian digital advertising talent market. Entry-level roles accounted for just 1% of vacancies among the organisations surveyed, while 49% of open roles required more than six years of experience.

Within the surveyed organisations, the vacancy rate fell to 2.4%, its lowest level since IAB Australia began tracking it, and only 40% reported any open roles. At the same time, the capability gaps employers identified were not simply technical. They included strategic thinking, commercial acumen, leadership and the ability to work effectively with clients and businesses.

These capabilities are built through exposure to clients and stakeholders, commercial decisions, feedback, responsibility and a broader view of how marketing work creates value. If employers stop creating entry-level pathways and investing in emerging marketing talent, they cannot expect a deep pool of experienced practitioners to appear later.

The Production Line Problem

Over the past decade, many companies have built extraordinarily efficient delivery teams: specialists who do one thing, do it well and do it at scale. On paper, it makes sense. In practice, taken too far, this model can produce practitioners who are technically capable but commercially underdeveloped and increasingly difficult to promote into broader senior roles.

Specialisation is not the enemy. For junior practitioners, a focused role can build technical confidence quickly. A paid media specialist should understand paid media, and a search practitioner should know search.

The problem comes later. By the time these practitioners reach mid-weight or senior level, they may suddenly be expected to become commercially minded client advisers without enough opportunity to develop those skills. They may have spent years removed from client conversations, account profitability discussions and the wider commercial realities of the business.

Agencies frequently justify this structure by pointing to account management. They believe technical specialists are not naturally client-facing, so a separate layer manages the relationship. However, this can delay commercial development until much later in someone’s career. It can also leave senior specialists struggling to demonstrate the broader commercial value increasingly expected at senior salary levels.

It can frustrate clients and stakeholders too. A recurring concern I hear from marketing leaders is the inability to speak directly with the people actually doing the work. They want strategic conversations with practitioners, rather than having every insight filtered through layers of account management. Strong relationships between marketing managers and digital agencies rely on clarity and communication as well as technical execution.

To address this long-term, agencies can start involving junior team members in selected client meetings, asking them to present a recommendation or giving them greater visibility into the objectives and constraints shaping an account. The goal is not to turn every specialist into an account manager. It is to develop practitioners who can connect technical execution with stronger commercial advice.

What Automation Is Making Worse

The post-Covid growth period accelerated a trend that was already underway in many organisations. Demand increased rapidly, development struggled to keep pace and experienced practitioners were often required to spend more time as billable resources rather than mentors. Structured development suffered, and the growth of AI is making that challenge more urgent.

AI is changing how marketing work is done, but it is also changing how people learn the job. As routine execution becomes easier to automate, many of the lower-risk tasks that once gave junior practitioners space to practise, make mistakes and build experience are disappearing.

That does not reduce the need for early-career talent. Instead, agencies and businesses need to be more deliberate about creating opportunities for those people to develop judgement, context and commercial understanding.

Early-career practitioners need opportunities to understand a brief, question assumptions, interpret performance, communicate recommendations and recognise when an automated output is not good enough.

If automation removes basic execution work, organisations and agencies need to replace its learning value deliberately. Without that scaffolding, the talent pipeline narrows further.

Blaming The Pool They Drained

When organisations struggle to hire or retain digital marketing talent, the labour market is an easy target. And, to be fair, the pool at certain experience levels is genuinely shallow. But in many cases, part of the underlying problem may be much closer to home.

Fast-growing companies can outgrow their internal infrastructure, leading to unclear career paths. Management capability may struggle to keep pace with headcount, while culture can become reactive rather than intentional. In other businesses, environments built around excessive pressure or distrust can drive churn that salary alone may not fix.

When experienced talent becomes scarce, headhunting intensifies. But people who are engaged, challenged and can see a future for themselves may be less susceptible to external approaches. The companies that retain great people are not necessarily always the highest payers. Often, they have simply built something worth staying for.

How Smarter Companies Are Hiring Differently

The good news is that some organisations and agencies are recognising the structural problem and beginning to address it, not simply by changing who they hire, but by changing how they develop people from day one.

First, rethink what good hiring looks like. Rather than filtering candidates primarily by platform expertise or tool certifications, place greater value on curiosity, adaptability and what some leaders describe as “taste”: the judgement to recognise quality, solve problems creatively and spot opportunities others miss.

Many technical skills can be taught. Commercial judgement, however, is difficult to develop if people are never given the opportunity to practise it.

Second, build commercial capability earlier. Give specialists exposure to client conversations, account performance and commercial decision-making before they reach senior roles. Commercial thinking does not appear automatically with experience. It develops through deliberate exposure to how agencies and their clients create value.

Finally, invest in the pipeline. Graduate and internship programs can be tempting to reduce when businesses are focused on short-term efficiency, but they remain an important way to create the next generation of experienced marketers.

The same applies to broader pathways for people beginning a career in digital marketing. If the industry does not invest in developing experienced people, it cannot expect experienced people simply to appear.

The Real Question Businesses Need To Ask

Australia’s digital marketing talent shortage is real. But treating it purely as a recruitment problem risks missing the bigger picture.

Many of today’s hiring challenges can also be traced to decisions organisations have made over time: increasingly specialised roles, greater separation between commercial and technical teams, reduced investment in junior talent and an understandable focus on short-term efficiency.

None of those decisions is unreasonable in isolation. Collectively, however, they can narrow the pathway that develops commercially capable marketers.

The companies most likely to solve the problem will not simply refine their recruitment processes. They will build more of the commercial capability they are struggling to hire, rather than hoping somebody else develops it first.

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