Companies keen for marketing talent
Like many students, Elyse Robert graduated university with an arts degree and struggled to land a job, but now businesses are vying for her skills.
‘‘I’m only a few weeks into fulltime freelance life, but even getting this far is beyond a dream for me,’’ she said.
Robert studied a bachelor of arts at the University of Victoria and went on to study an honours and masters degree in media studies because she couldn’t find work with just her BA.
The 28-year-old is now a freelance digital marketing and communications consultant specialising in qualitative and quantitative data.
‘‘So that’s bringing together the emotions, beautiful pictures and social media marketing, with analytics and data,’’ she said.
‘‘And that’s quite a tricky field because traditionally people are either experts in the public relations side or in the data side, but I marry them both together.’’
She teamed up with two other students after graduating who now run Uprise - a successful digital advertising agency.
The need for data and digital-savvy workers is booming and Robert’s client list just keeps growing.
‘‘I’ve kicked into freelancing because there’s such a huge demand, huge,’’ she said.
‘‘Digital marketing has been about storytelling. Now it’s moving towards listening, and not telling.
‘‘It’s a funny thing to remind businesses that they’re job is to listen to customers - you have to be servicing a need, you can’t make one up.’’
Across New Zealand, the most in demand sector on Seek for January was marketing and communications jobs.
The top three jobs were marketing assistants with 80 jobs, marketing communication specialist (73 jobs), and digital and search marketers (77 jobs).
Canterbury saw the greatest growth for the industry, advertising 27 jobs - 18 per cent more than a year ago.
With a global decline in middle-management roles companies are under pressure from staff to communicate what’s going on within the company. Employment growth in advertising, public relations and sales is expected to grow by 4.8 per cent by 2019, according to Statistics New Zealand. With more than 2000 job openings expected for this year.
‘‘There’s an increase in expectations from the public and workers for access to information. As we’re seeing change in organisations from restructuring, mergers, and technology changes, there’s a greater expectation from employees to know what’s going on,’’ said Public Relations Institute of New Zealand chief executive Elaine Koller.
University of Victoria lecturer in media studies Doug Van Belle isn’t surprised communications skills are in demand, and has seen a rise in the number of students focused on marketing expertise.
‘‘Over the last few years, the industry has started to figure out how to work with the new media revolution,’ he said.
‘‘Prior to that, everybody was experimenting to see what would work to push messages, to market, to advertise, and nobody was certain what was working and what wasn’t.’’