If Our Industry Is so Good at Creating Experiences, Why Aren’t We Doing so for Our Talent?

Experiences are at the forefront of marketing today – after all, we’re in the experience economy and every agency seems to want a piece of experience creation. So why is it that the average agency experience that young talent finds itself in isn’t so great? If we are to attract and retain the best, most diverse talent, we need to utilise our skills in creating meaningful experiences. This is critical to both ensure we are better at helping educators grow industry-ready talent and to assist talent development once in the workplace.

The world has changed immensely over the past few years. Technology is driving change at a rate education and business struggles to keep up with. And with its emphasis on memory-based learning, schooling and higher education is not creating a future-ready workforce for our industry.  In addition to this, traditional working parameters are becoming blurred as the working day becomes more flexible, working away from the office becomes more common and career paths begin to take a less traditional route. Consequently, education and career progression need to evolve to give students and employees fresh tools and skills to better suit today’s rapidly developing industry.

Ideas are the lifeblood of our industry and we need to help nurture talent to whom creativity is second nature. Experience counts for nothing when it comes to seeding fresh, innovative ideas, so we should work to create the best environments to allow young teams to flourish and feed their creativity. What’s needed is educational environments that allow for more meaningful experiences that give creativity more value and more closely resemble the world we work in.  What this means is there should be more emphasis placed on imaginative, self-motivated activity with less structure.

How can we achieve this?

Take inspiration from innovative education

One way to help achieve this is to take inspiration from innovative educational institutions such as Hyper Island and the School of Communication Arts who have highly creative and collaborative courses which forge close links with industry. It’s one of the reasons we’ve engaged with Innovate UK as an agency, which is helping us forge connections with academic institutions that have an innovative and collaborative mindset in their courses - such as York University’s Immersive Narrative course. Our aim is to work with degree and masters students - bringing them into our business to both help build their careers and to assist us to distribute new ways of thinking.

Change the way we work and open opportunities

It’s not just the educational environment that needs to work differently, it’s the working environment that needs to have a more open and collaborative approach.  Forge new partnerships with start-ups and other innovative bodies and together map out new ways of working that stimulate fresh thinking and idea generation. 

Accept that it’s an iterative process

These are all good routes to change, but I don’t believe there is a silver bullet for success. The best approach is to accept that it will be an iterative process, which will be continually amended and refined as we learn along the way – much in the same way that creative ideas are born and developed

As traditional education routes look set to only increase in cost the time is right to consider new approaches, and we as industry professionals need to play an active role in crafting them. The great thing about brand experience is that by its nature, it attracts a diverse bunch of talented people – let’s make the most of that maverick nature and do things differently. The sooner we can attract more talented young people into the business, the greater our success will be and the more extraordinary experiences we’ll create – for everyone.