and for years we’d ask members what topics we should cover, and each year without fail, the ‘War for Talent’ would be one of the top suggestions. No matter how many times we reported on the challenges of attracting staff into retail as a career path rather than just a temporary job, we’d still get asked for more. While these challenges might persist, I’ve certainly noticed a changing perception around the prospect of retail careers, led by some amazing industry leaders and increasing formal education opportunities in the industry. Based on my sample – my RMIT students – retailers and brands that have positioned themselves to appeal to younger generations’ search for value-aligned work have become particularly desired. Yet just as the retail industry has started making ground in one Talent War, another one is coming: the War for MarTech skills. MarTech skills: critical for retailers, but hard to find Why is this latest Talent War specifically about MarTech skills? A few reasons. First, MarTech helps retailers do better marketing; it helps with finding, attracting, and engaging with customers, creating and scaling campaigns, measuring effectiveness, and so on. In an increasingly competitive industry it can be the difference between profitability and growth, or quickly falling behind. Second, it’s an extremely fast-moving space. The latest MarTech Landscape lists over 14,000 different MarTech solutions, growth of nearly 30 per cent in a year, and over double where the industry was just five years ago. Expertise in what all these tools are, and how they fit together, is pretty critical. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there are critical skills gaps in MarTech. Not just in retail, everywhere. Only 28 per cent of businesses feel they have adequate in-house MarTech skills, while 74 per cent say their skills gap is critical. The impact is that despite organisations having invested in literally hundreds of MarTech tools, they use only around a third of them. Why? No one knows how to use them. I heard this consistently while interviewing C-suite marketers for a white paper I co-authored on the challenges of MarTech. One CMO described the scarcity of MarTech skills as an “absolute pain point for not just me, but probably every CMO in the country”, and it got worse. Even after finding these people with MarTech skills, it’s hard to keep them. “ We tend to take on more junior people, we train them up, but then of course, they get picked off and it happens all the time,” the CMO said. So what can retailers do about it? I’m going to propose two inter-related strategies: creating a formal pathway into these roles, then making them fun. 1. Create a pathway The MarTech World Forum was recently held in Melbourne. Multiple speakers (including me) spoke about the lack of pathways into MarTech, driven by a lack of formal education opportunities. Most people working in MarTech roles didn’t set out to be MarTech professionals, they fell into it. Some started in marketing and gradually picked up technical skills, others came from technical domains and developed marketing knowledge along the way. This ‘falling in’ was true for retail for many years and may still be for many roles. Yet retail has made strides in addressing this through the now numerous formal education pathways – not just for shop-floor staff but also for head-office leaders. The good news is, the same is coming for MarTech skills. I’m fortunate at RMIT to be leading the development of brand new MarTech courses, including one of the first MarTech majors for undergraduates in the world. But having the education pathway is only half the battle. People have to want to pursue that pathway in the first place. This is where the focus needs to shift from the technical aspects to something more fundamental – joy. 2. Spread the joy I mentioned the recent MarTech World Forum and how I spoke on MarTech’s pathway problem. The title of my topic was ‘Where’s the Joy?’, with a plea to attendees to focus less on the ‘tech’ of MarTech and more on the human aspects. This might seem counterintuitive. Isn’t MarTech all about automation, efficiency and data? But that’s precisely the issue. We’ve been so focused on the technology that we’ve forgotten about the humans who need to implement and use it. And humans, it turns out, perform better when they enjoy what they’re doing and feeling personally involved. This concept of psychological ownership is particularly important. We engage more deeply and find more satisfaction when we feel like we own our work outputs. This is one of the challenges of technology, automation and even AI. If the tech does the work for you, what do the humans contribute and own? The great news is that retail has plenty of opportunities for joy and psychological ownership. Look no further than the Retailer Awards. Everyone there, from head office, to store managers, to customer-service staff, exhibited such genuine pride in what they had created. They weren’t just implementing automated, optimised or efficient solutions, they were creating joy for customers and themselves. Filling the tech gap with joy Like any war, Retail’s War for Talent 2.0 won’t be won overnight. I’m not proposing that making MarTech roles for retailers sound fun will magically fill these skills gaps. What I am saying is that while formal education in MarTech is emerging to fill the skills gap, retailers can set themselves up to be the employers of choice by focusing not on the tech, but on the joy it can create.