Sian Conway-Wood has been struggling to recruit entry-level marketers with fundamental skills. She argues that the trade deserves recognition from the new UK Prime Minister as a technical discipline alongside manufacturing, energy and science.<\/p>\n
Andy Burnham just valued the hard hat as much as the graduation cap. Lest he forget the thing that sells what\u2019s under both.<\/p>\n
Last week in this column, I argued that Britain needs a rebrand<\/a> and that governments can\u2019t build one. The machinery for setting a national mood sits with our industry, not Westminster. This week, Westminster picked up a different tool and swung it harder than it has in years.<\/p>\n Andy Burnham has put technical education back at the center of the national story. Skills from 14. Work experience. Real routes into real work, shaped by local employers. A million young people have been written off as having nowhere to go, and this is a plan to build them somewhere. It\u2019s serious, overdue and I desperately want it to work.<\/p>\n Then I read the list of industries these new routes will serve. Advanced manufacturing. Clean energy. Life sciences. Creative industries \u201cin our cities.\u201d<\/p>\n Creativity gets a postcode restriction. Marketing doesn\u2019t get named at all.<\/p>\n We have a branding problem, which is a professional embarrassment<\/p>\n Marketing is missing from the technical conversation because we\u2019ve allowed it to be filed as a soft skill. The thing the confident kid drifts into. Vibes with a deck.<\/p>\n Our industry did do that. We have spent two decades talking about magic, disruption, reach and storytelling, training a generation to believe the craft was instinct rather than knowledge.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now the bill has arrived.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, Ipsos and Mark Ritson tested 1,226 working marketers on the fundamentals<\/a>. Segmentation. The 4Ps. The difference between quant and qual. Just 35% passed.<\/p>\n Two in three practicing marketers can\u2019t demonstrate the basics of the thing they\u2019re paid to do, while 84% rate themselves above average.<\/p>\n Technical has come to mean physical, mechanical or STEM. Something you can hold. In that framing, an entire discipline that is technical to its bones falls through the gap.<\/p>\n The same Ipsos study found that the strongest predictor of whether someone could do the job wasn\u2019t experience or seniority. It was formal training. Teach marketing and people can do it. Leave it to instinct and they can\u2019t.<\/p>\n A body of knowledge. A measurable national skills gap. A training route that demonstrably works. If that isn\u2019t technical education, nothing on Burnham\u2019s list is either.<\/p>\n Take the government\u2019s own list of growth industries. Every firm in advanced manufacturing, clean energy and life sciences has to find customers, explain what it does, differentiate itself and sell. A brilliant clean-energy startup nobody has heard of is a brilliant clean-energy startup that folds.<\/p>\n Around 60% of new businesses fail within five years, and after cash flow, the leading causes are on the demand side: no market need, no differentiation and no route to the customer. Small firms cannot always afford senior marketers and instead rely on a talent pool in which two-thirds can\u2019t pass a basic skills test.<\/p>\n \n Want to go deeper? Ask The Drum<\/p>\n We are the discipline that makes those industries commercially viable. You can reindustrialize the regions and still lose the businesses if nobody in them can sell.<\/p>\n I relocated my agency from Chancery Lane to Hastings, the third-most-deprived district in England. We work with national and international clients, and around 85% of our income is earned outside the region and spent in the local economy.<\/p>\n Yes, we wanted a nice life by the sea. But we also had a talent problem.<\/p>\n We practice behavioral marketing, the psychology of why people buy, and we couldn\u2019t hire for it. Not graduates, not midweights, not even people a decade into their careers. The talent is out there, but nobody is teaching the fundamentals anymore, let alone the behavioral layer on top.<\/p>\n Promising hires arrived needing to be taught the craft from the ground up. Six months of salary later, once they were getting good, they would be snapped up by a network agency with deeper pockets.<\/p>\n So we built the training ourselves.<\/p>\n We are now a placement partner for East Sussex College\u2019s T Levels in marketing and business. T Levels are a two-year technical qualification taken by 16- to 19-year-olds instead of A levels. They are worth the same as three A levels and include a substantial 315-hour industry placement.<\/p>\n They\u2019re good.\u00a0<\/p>\n Several months in, they\u2019re producing work I\u2019d put ahead of that of many graduates, and I say that as someone who lectures on several MBA programs. They are debt-free, local and being taught the fundamentals instead of guessing at them.<\/p>\n The debate over whether apprentices or graduates are better for a business<\/a> often misses the value of combining structured teaching with meaningful time inside the workplace. This is Burnham\u2019s model, already running in the kind of town his list quietly wrote off.<\/p>\n The creative economy is not a metropolitan luxury. Marketing is an export industry that can be practiced from anywhere with a laptop, an Adobe subscription, a Canva account, a Canon camera and trained talent. That makes it one of the few portable, scalable opportunities a coastal town like this has.<\/p>\n Research across UK cities found that each creative job supports at least 1.9 additional local jobs in caf\u00e9s and services that can\u2019t be offshored. The effect may be modest where the creative base is small, but it provides a foundation a training pipeline can grow.<\/p>\n Last week, I said our industry should have the nerve to lead. Here\u2019s the nearest test we\u2019re going to get.<\/p>\n Nobody is going to argue our corner for us. Politicians don\u2019t wake up worried that marketing might be undervalued. We\u2019ve spent 30 years assuring them it\u2019s all instinct and champagne.<\/p>\n If we want our craft recognized as the technical discipline it is, and taught to the kids who would be brilliant at it, we have to say so loudly while the list is still being written. The industry has spent years asking how it can attract more young people<\/a>. Here is a practical answer.<\/p>\n Value the hard hat. Value the graduation cap. Then value the thing that sells whatever\u2019s under both, and teach it to a 16-year-old in a town who was never going to be handed a London internship but can already do the job.<\/p>\n Get that right and you give a generation of young people a career. You also give the industries you\u2019re betting the country\u2019s future on someone who can sell what they make.<\/p>\n The government\u2019s list might not name our industry or value the talent coming up behind us. But I do. Next year, we\u2019re taking on 20 business, marketing and creative production students for 350 hours each in a studio built to train them properly. And I need the industry\u2019s help.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve built a career in this business, come and spend an hour with them. Tell them how you got in. Show them what the work looks like. Let a 16-year-old in Hastings who has never met anyone who does this for a living hear that the door is open and that someone like them walked through it.<\/p>\n Aspiration is taught by example, and most of these kids have never had the example in the room.<\/p>\n We spent 30 years making this industry look like it belonged to people from somewhere else. Here\u2019s an hour of your time to prove it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n