America needs more people with skills in advertising and marketing—230,000 more, to be exact, according to LinkedIn’s latest monthly workforce report published on Thursday.
The shortage, surprisingly, is most dire in large cities: San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Seattle and even New York City, the center of the media and advertising universe.
In the meantime, Florida (Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm Beach) and the West Coast, other than Silicon Valley, (Orange County, Calif. and Las Vegas) have an abundance of good marketers relative to their population size.
“Skills gaps like these are fundamentally local, and specific to the supply and demand of individual skills,” the report noted. That means a city can have too many talented individuals with certain skills and too few with others.
For example, New York has an abundance of qualified people in finance, fashion, law and theatre, but businesses are struggling to find good salesmen, event managers and engineers, according to LinkedIn’s city-specific job statistics.
San Francisco, on the other hand, has a surplus of software engineers but faces a shortage in almost every other job category.
However, not all marketing jobs are secure, high-paying ones, especially in small companies. Startups often need branding and sales most, but many startups prefer hiring marketers as contractors or part-time workers rather than full-time employees.
In some cases, it’s due to the nature of the job, such as organizing an event. But a more profound reason is that most startups don’t recognize marketing as an essential function of their business. They would rather spend their always tight funding on core functions like developers and engineers.
“Small businesses may not have resources for a full-time marketing hire, but they still need these skills—which range from social media and digital marketing, to market research and branding,” the report said.
Here are the most and least needed jobs in New York and San Francisco:
