We are sleepwalking into a skills crisis

The marketing industry is sleepwalking into a skills crisis. Last year, agencies in the UK made more people redundant than at any time since the financial crisis, yet finding the right talent has never been harder. How can both of these things be true?

The answer lies in a structural shift that is causing an existential mismatch between the supply and demand for talent. Intense pressure on agency margins is forcing a relentless focus on immediate profitability. 

In this environment, junior roles are the first casualty. They are, in the short term, an investment, less profitable and harder to deploy than senior practitioners. 

The warning signs are clear. The talent pipeline is constricting, with the latest IPA Agency Census showing the proportion of employees aged 25 and under has fallen to just 13.6% in 2024, down from 17.4% in 2022. 

Compounding this, entry-level hiring is being actively squeezed. In London’s network agencies, net hiring growth for junior roles is 120% lower than for manager-level positions - a clear sign that these vital opportunities are not being created or (worse) offshored.

The problem is, when today's junior executives are not being hired and trained correctly, where will tomorrow's experienced directors and leaders come from? 

This skills gap is colliding with a profound capability gap across the industry. The truth is, the capabilities needed to drive growth are evolving faster than our talent pool. We need practitioners with a deeper, more integrated understanding of technology, data, and commercial strategy to navigate this new landscape. 

A talent time bomb

It is precisely this urgent need for deeper skills that makes the narrative around AI so dangerously alluring – the idea that it can solve the problem for the industry. It will not. To put it bluntly, if we do not invest in building this talent today, we will feel the full weight of this crisis in five to eight years.

This isn't just about training more people; it's about training the right skills: the critical thinkers who can fuse technological expertise with marketing knowledge – the uniquely human skill that turns data into strategy, observations into breakthroughs, and client relationships into partnerships. We need people who can question a brief, understand nuance, and provide ethical oversight. 

They need to know how to deploy technology to handle the ‘what,’ but they must have the talent to determine the ‘why’ and the ‘what's next.’ These are the skills that will only appreciate over time.

The good news is that there is a solution. We must focus on building a talent pipeline suitable for today's industry. This means an industry-wide commitment to entry-level training, hiring for potential, and doing away with rigid qualification criteria. 

This is not just theory. At my own agency, WeDiscover, we are now in the fourth year of our Early Careers Programme, which trains new entrants with foundational skills in performance marketing, data science, and AI. Founded in 2020, we have grown to over 60 people at a compounding rate of 50% per year, and today, 26% of our team has come through that programme. This is not about altruism; it's a strategic initiative for the long-term health of our agency. 

A new kind of metric to measure success

My proposal is to turn this private investment into a public benchmark. I am calling on our industry's leading publications to introduce a new, critical metric in their annual agency reports: Investment in Early Careers. Let's measure it, rank it, and celebrate it. Let the agencies that are truly building the future of our industry be recognised for it.

Ultimately, this is a question of competitive advantage. The agencies and teams that thrive in the coming decade will not be those with the best technology, but those with the best people wielding that technology. 

The future of our industry will be defined by the quality of the collaboration between human talent and artificial intelligence. Our primary role as leaders is not just to invest in smarter tools, but to build the smarter strategists, creatives, and critical thinkers capable of mastering them. 

Technology is the amplifier, but human talent is, and always will be, the signal.

Byron Tassoni-Resch is the CEO and co-founder of performance marketing agency WeDiscover.