Here’s a question – which is more important – Education or an associated Certificate/Award? A significant trend is emerging in the online space – education is being separated from the certification.
Take for instance, the announcement by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) that they are to give away their courses for FREE, through the newly created “M.I.T.x” interactive online learning platform. However, the award will not be a regular M.I.T. degree, but rather a credential bearing the name of a new not-for-profit body to be created within M.I.T; revenues from the credentialing, officials said, would go to support the M.I.T.x platform.
M.I.T. pioneered online learning 10 years ago by posting course materials online from almost all its classes. Its free OpenCourseWare now includes nearly 2,100 courses and has been used by more than 100 million people.
But M.I.T. is not alone. There is an increasing number of other excellent FREE online education resources, examples being BBC, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, and LearningSpace to name just a few.
However, as pointed out above, what these online colleges offer is an education, not an award.
So, what does this availability of free education mean? Will it make universities redundant? Will people continue to pay to go to the classroom? Will we in the Digital Marketing Institute have to offer our courses for free?
To answer this, consider this question – let’s assume that you are being interviewed for a new job (or perhaps you are the interviewer!). Would you prefer to have the education alone or the education AND the certification (which is effectively proof of your education)?
I think that there is a market for both. What do you think?
The very pointed message that we in the Digital Marketing Institute are receiving from our Advisory Council (including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, etc) is that, in every single market, there is a very recognisable skills gap.
Wherever you live, there are simply not enough digital marketing professionals to meet the demand. A talent gap has developed between the skills that advertising and marketing jobs require and the number of people who possess those skills. This challenge is one that is affecting all sectors.
The talent pool is simply not large enough and those with the skills are in high demand. The good news (for the job seekers) is those with the required skills are commanding salaries of €80,000 and more.
There are jobs a-begging.
Digital marketing budgets and spending are growing at a rate of at least 20% per annum. The digital sector is treating the recession with contempt! To keep up with demand, the country needs intelligent, skilled professionals – lots of them, as fast as possible!
And the great thing about this sector is that it is exportable. Irish agencies – including Cybercom, RingJohn, Digital Marketing Institute and Adforce to name a few – are blazing an international digital trail.
Ireland has a flourishing digital marketing sector. One of the things that we need in this country is for the “establishment” (including the government and the universities) to recognise the opportunity and not be fearful of it!
Maybe Santa will come in on a fast broadband sleigh and bring good educational tidings with him!
Digital Marketing Institute, the Dublin based professional training and certification organisation, has launched a new operation in Dubai. This new organisation will train and certify students in all aspects of digital marketing throughout the Middle East region.
This new sister organisation, Digital Marketing Institute Middle East, will start offering Professional Diploma courses in the UAE from January and plans to expand across the Arab world in 2012.
Digital Marketing Institute Middle East will meet the growing demand in the region for digital marketing skills.
"Any of the digital marketing professionals we have spoken to here in the region - and we have spoken to a lot of them - will tell you that their biggest challenge is just finding those local skills," said David Carpenter, the chief executive of the newly formed Digital Marketing Institute Middle East. "There is a major problem here, and it's only going to accelerate."
One local Irish entrepreneur in the region's fledgling e-commerce industry confirmed that finding specialists in digital marketing is difficult.
"It's one of the challenges I faced," said Paul Kenny, the founder and chief executive of the daily deals site Cobone, at the launch. "There are actually not many people here practising digital."
“We are delighted with the establishment of Digital Marketing Institute Middle East” said Anthony Quigley, co-founder of Digital Marketing Institute. “Digital marketing is the fastest growing and most dynamic sector in the global economy today. It has enormous potential in the Middle East for economic development, job creation and business. We look forward to helping to make this region a global centre of excellence for digital marketing.” Digital Marketing Institute estimates that the Middle East training and certification market will be worth over €2 million to the Institute within two years.
Digital marketing is less mature in the Arab world than in Ireland and there are as yet no definitive statistics on expenditure. According to Google, total spending on digital advertising in the Middle East and North Africa will total $175 million this year.
Left to Right - Adrian Feane (DMI IE) and David Carpenter (DMI ME), Wendy Dorman-Smith (Irish Embassy, UAE), Mary Mulcahy (DMI ME), Ciaran Madden (Irish Ambassador, UAE) and Anthony Quigley (DMI IE)
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The ever-increasing demand for digital marketing continues tirelessly! Running in parallel with this demand (which outstrips supply throughout the globe) is the requirement for associated education in an effort to help traditional marketers to understand this new paradigm.
Digital Marketing Institute is one of the few businesses in Ireland helping to meet this demand and seem to be hitting the mark with full employment for students.
Digital Marketing Institute is accepting the next intake of students for their Postgraduate Diploma in Digital Marketing. This is the only such postgraduate qualification that is fully accredited in Ireland. It is certified by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) under the European Qualifications Framework. It therefore provides students with a recognisable, transferable, international qualification.
The course is taken over 8 months. The contact hours comprise 48 lectures, 4 workshop/tutorials, taken over 2 Semesters. All of the lectures are very interactive and packed with case studies and workshops throughout. Lectures are delivered by practising experts from the digital marketing industry who are currently planning and implementing winning digital marketing campaigns on behalf of their clients.
As stated, to date, there has been 100% employment success from this course, with previous students securing senior roles within the digital marketing sector.
Some of the organisations that past students now work with include Google, Facebook, ESB, Lisney, Westin Hotels, Ladbrokes, Barclays Bank, Jameson Whiskey and Microsoft.
Previous Students Testimonials:
“This training has allowed me to refocus my career within my organisation and brought a wider range of skills to my role”. – Brand Manager, Jameson
"The postgraduate diploma in digital marketing has been both engaging and enjoyable and helped me secure a new job specialising in online marketing". - Online Brand Executive
"I will continue to recommend you,without hesitation as you run excellent courses and have an excellent calibre of tutors."
The Digital Marketing Institute has gathered an elite cluster of business and digital media specialists to help give online businesses a kick start through two dedicated training programmes.
The goal is to help clients create the ideal blueprint for building their online business. Along with identifying the right business model, they will have a comprehensive overview of all the major disciplines required including site development, marketing, e-commerce, operations and finance. A successful online company has many components. For example, understanding the online marketplace is critical to defining the brand and business model. Mapping out marketing, advertising and legal strategy prior to web development will avoid expensive delays and changes. It is vital to get the right advice at the right stage to minimise the risks.
“We know if our clients get the best advice in the correct sequence they will avoid costly errors and get it right first time. To this end we’ve sourced the finest minds in their fields and designed high impact programmes around the expertise,” says DMI founder Ian Dodson. All the contributors are experienced business people in their own right. They include; former entrepreneur of the year and cloud technology specialist John Beckett and Gerry Delaney, former finance advisor to the Smurfit Group; social media guru Khrishna De and Sean Kirwan, Ireland’s most respected authority on e-commerce issues.
Both programmes, the week-long boot camp and the 12 session weekly night course are designed to be highly motivational and interactive. They are equally suited to those looking for a career change and those who want to transfer their businesses to online. Video introduction to ‘Building an Online Business’ with course leaders Helen Curtin and Des Martin.
When it comes to the web more and more people are suffering from a split personality. What we do at home as consumers and users of the web is completely different from what we try to do as business people when we promote our company online.
The first step to a successful business web presence is to reconcile those two parts of your personality. At home we enjoy the freedoms that the web brings us like downloading music, buying books, booking flights and even more importantly connecting with other people. We love Facebook, we love the dynamics of human interaction.
But then something happens the next day as we walk into work. We forget who we are and how we like ot use the web at home. Our minds get wiped, our personality splits, we become someone else and we do things on our websites as businesses that we as consumers would never swallow.
For example....
As business people we stuff our websites full of text and white papers and 200 page pdf brochures and archives of press releases. At home we prefer to watch a quick video online than read pages of text.
As businesses we hide our people. Our sites are devoid of human beings (unless they are stock photos of eternally smiling American models) whereas at home we seek out people, we always look for the human connection, the person to talk to.
As businesses we want customers to help themselves. We provide FAQ's and help documentation and anonymous support email addresses and we send emails that say "do not reply" to this address. God forbid a customer would actually want to talk to one of us. Whereas at home we love dealing with companies who let us talk to their people in person, we like feeling that we are heard and understood.
If you want a successful web presence, reconcile the two halves of your personality. Start by looking at how you and your family use the web at home and bring that with you to work.
Maybe its an illustration of the fact that digital marketing hasn't really travelled that far from the weaknesses of traditional marketing. In real world marketing we fooled ourselves for years with big numbers. A newspaper had 250,000 readers or a tv programme had 500,000 viewers and those numbers gave us great comfort that our advertising was therefore worthwhile. Yet hidden in these numbers was a huge fallacy that exposure somehow equalled impact.
And now in digital marketing we engage in the same smoke and mirrors with numbers. Look at your email or your twitter stream or your newspaper and see how many stories are about size. Facebook has nearly 700 million users, Twitter has a gazillion and Linkedin has a bazillion. All of which is meaningless guff and repeats the mistakes of the past. An all too willing eagerness to believe that bigger is better.
This particular fallacy lies at the convergence of two trends. Firstly the idea that when it comes to digital marketing bigger is better when all the proof points to the opposite and secondly the idea that the internet somehow gives people access to a global market when in fact it doesn't.
Talk to anyone in digital and all they talk about is "more". More subscribers, more likes, more tweets, more traffic. "More" is a blunt instrument with which to gauge the success of a digital marketing campaign especially when the focus of every successful digital campaign I've seen ultimately looks at quality, not quantity. Big is the enemy of good. Digital marketing is at its most powerful when it is focused and specific and refined and small. A social media campaign that has 10,000 likes is not as good a s one that has 100 people actually engaging with a company through the channel. Likes are cheap. Relationships are expensive. The dynamic on any decent digital marketing campaign is away from quantity and towards quality.
Did you every read the story about the bike shop in Sligo that sold a bike to a kid in Canada? I see stories like this highlighted often in the media lauding the fact the internet has shrunk the world and its a global village and now we can sell everywhere and we have access to a global market. All of which of course is a load of old tosh! If you want access to a global market, get a global marketing budget. The internet is at its strongest when it gives you access to a local market. For the vast majority of businesses their customers are within 50 miles of them. If Groupon/Citydeals has demonstrated anything its that the web ultimately provides you access to your local catchment.
Facebook's particular strain of the "size" disease is about to bite them in the ass. When your single blunt metric for communicating the strength of your business is to only refer to size, then as soon as those numbers plateau, by your own standards you've failed. Wait for the string of articles now about to appear questioning Facebook's reason for existence and comparing their evolutionary path and ultimate extinction to Bebo and Myspace.
As Digital Marketers the one thing that differentiated us from traditional media was our ability to provide real and meaningful numbers. As Marketers we took great solace in the clarity they provided but we've gotten complacent and in the race to out do each other we've reverted to type. I'll see your 700 million and raise you a billion.
A quick synopsis of the the 2011 Digital Salary & Employment Survey confirms our worst fears at Digital Marketing Institute about the quality of graduates that our universities are producing in this country. For some time anecdotal evidence has pointed towards the lack of digital education at third level. I recently spoke with seven marketing graduates (Class of 2011) who started the Digital Marketing Institute Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing in the past 3 weeks. When asked what percentage of their marketing degrees covered digital? the unanimous response was ZERO!!
Key findings from the survey include
The downturn has accelerated the uptake of digital sales and marketing processes within Irish companies.
Even the most creative of roles will now be assessed in terms of its direct impact on the bottom line.
Traditional advertising agencies are losing campaigns to other countries
Indigenous digital agency sector is gaining international renown
Shortcomings, particularly in regard to the pipeline of talent entering the digital economy.
Educational curriculum needs an increased focus on producing graduates for a digital economy
Multinationals tend to absorb the best talent in the market
Where is the demand?
Roles where demand exceeds supply, include:
Web / Mobile Developers
E Commerce Managers (especially those with retail experience as our indigenous retailers are now compelled to compete with the likes of Asos.com and similar Digital shopping destinations)
Interactive/Digital Designers (especially those who have experience of designing for big brands or within an advertising agency environment)
Digital Product Managers
Digital Account Managers from media - those with Digital planning and buying, and search marketing specifically are in huge demand.
Yesterday we came across a possible Internet fraud and identity theft issue. I wanted to highlight this in case you are also subject to this abuse.
Events (taking place in London) purporting to be "Digital Marketing Modules" (using content, logos and people associated directly with the Digital Marketing Institute) were hosted on 4 different event web sites, namely
Eventbrite
Brownpapertickets
Amiando
Ticketleap
(Click on the image and you see an example of what this person has done)
The perpetrator (who supplied his name and phone number as Simone Savage with a phone number +44 845 299 6048) simply copied content directly from the Digital Marketing Institute web site and claimed to be running a course.
I called this person on the above number and he answered to the name Simone. I asked him about this course and he told me that he was running it in partnership with with the Digital Marketing Institute. I then explained that I was calling from the Digital Marketing Institute and asked him to remove these pages. He said that he would.
I then emailed the Support and legal departments of the hosting web sites (mentioned above) - Eventbrite were back onto me immediately (although they have yet to remove the offending page). Ticketleap have removed the page. I have yet to hear from either Amiando and Brownpapertickets (who are both still hosting this "event").
I have also been in contact with the UK's Fraud Reporting agency (www.actionfraud.org.uk/). I have also been in contact with the Garda Fraud office in Harcourt Square and they reckon that it might be a UK issue.
Please be aware that this is going on. Is there anything else that we can do?
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Here’s a question – which is more important – Education or an associated Certificate/Award? A significant trend is emerging in the online space – education is being separated from the certification.
The very pointed message that we in the Digital Marketing Institute are receiving from our Advisory Council (including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, etc) is that, in every single market, there is a very recognisable skills gap.
We are delighted to announce that there has been 100% employment rate from the last Postgraduate Diploma in Digital Marketing run in Dublin, Ireland.
