Overworked creatives not getting enough time to develop skills, Adobe survey suggests
Australian creative professionals aren’t staying up to date with their technical skills as well as their APAC peers, a new survey conducted by Adobe has suggested.
That reluctance to brush up on skills may be a structural problem for a time poor industry overwhelmed by data and content Alex Amado, Adobe’s vice president for experience marketing, told a conference on Thursday.
The Adobe Creative Pulse 2017 survey polled 5442 creative and marketing professionals across the Asia Pacific region including 736 in Australia and New Zealand.
The survey found 34% of Australian creatives were planning to upgrade their skills over the next six months as opposed to 45% of all of those across the APAC region.
Amado: Workload is preventing proper training for creatives
Amado told Mumbrella he believes that lack of investing in training is because of workloads, not complacency: “I think it’s hard, the demand for content is exploding but the number of people organisations have to manage the content is not keeping pace.
“There’s more pressure on every creative person to produce more and that demand is being driven by multiple screens, massive consumption of video and testing.
“The enterprises that care about these things have to find a way to make time for that reskilling to take place, it’s not an industry that has been used to the pace of change.”
Australian creatives were also less concerned about the effects of machine learning and AI on their jobs than their APAC peers with 60% saying they see no threat as opposed to just 50% across the region.
For Australian creative businesses, the emphasis was on content with 60% of respondents saying they are strategically investing in improved customer experience features, ahead of 56% planning to invest in digitisation and automation.
“I think some of it has to do with optimism versus pessimism on whether some of things are going to be beneficial and augmentations to what we do or whether they are going to be threats and forces that dictate about what we’re doing,” Amado said.
“Many people are underestimating how significant AI and machine learning are going to be, but I also think it’s going to happen in more subtle ways than people anticipate. We’re already seeing the impact of machine learning and automation, the user doesn’t even think that the reason their searches are coming back with smarter dat is because of the analytics behind the scenes.”
Data is playing a more important part in the worklives of creatives, the report found with over a third of all respondents saying big data and analytics are helping them make creative decisions and thirty percent saying they are getting better insight into their customers.
To Amado, that proportion will increase as data driven decision making is going to become a more fundamental part of a marketer’s or creative professional’s worklife. However managing that content and data also presents some challenges for businesses.
“One of the critical areas is asset management. With this explosion of content how do you get the right assets to the right people and make sure they are using the latest stuff? That’s a challenge and problem that we’ve been working on.”
