What Skills Do You Need to Get a DX Job?

If you’re a digital experience professional looking for work, you should have your pick of jobs.

According to data from job search engine Indeed.com, there are 4,101.9336 job postings per jobseeker who used “digital experience” as a search term (latest data August 23, 2016) .

It’s a dramatic revelation when you consider the term digital experience (DX) is still new — and that we were still trying to understand what DX meant this time last year.

That being said, if human resources professionals are allowing the term “digital experience” in job titles, the profession isn’t a flash in the pan. It’s here to stay.

Building Stronger Customer Relations

The opportunities for both the companies who leverage technologies and the professionals who provide the expertise are immense, according to Constellation Research analyst Natalie Petouhoff, who will be speaking at CMSWire’s DX Summit 2016 conference Nov. 14 to 16 in Chicago.

“Never in the history of business has there been the ability for the customer to talk directly to the brand in public and like cave paintings, those words last millions of years, for everyone to see…” she told CMSWire. ”Everything that a company needs to know, what to fix, what’s working, what’s not is generally what you find in digital/social posts,” she explained.

And the individuals who have the skills to do this probably didn’t learn them in college, unless you happen to be one of Petouhoff’s students at one of the UCLA campuses where she lectures about the strategic possibilities and tactical opportunities digital breadcrumbs bring to those who know how to leverage them. She continued:

“They give us the ability to measure the effectiveness of our effort, but only if we learn how to use the analytics and tools to measure … and how to translate traditional business goals into social/digital goals and then back into traditional goals so executives who don’t get digital understand that a brand sold more units, acquired more customers, saw fewer returns, increased word of mouth and sales.”

Whoa.

DX Professionals: Essential Skills

So something as simple as an MBA, a data scientist or social media diploma, a certificate in HTML, UX design, or even an ADDY probably won’t, in and of itself, be enough to win a significant job in Digital Experience.

“It is not just about picking a twitter handle or creating a bunch of cute cats playing pianos on a Facebook page (that the DX professional has to understand). It’s about the persona of the brand, how a brand expresses that persona in words, pictures, videos, hashtags, etc. What are the social media policies (guidelines) that a brand uses to ensure consistency in that messaging? Who posts (which department- customer service, marketing, product, PR, manufacturing, product dev…)? So it’s about organizational strategy and leadership too,” said Petouhoff.

And, based on the job descriptions we have seen for DX professionals, she knows of what she speaks.

In its job description for a DX manager, a chain of luxury New York City-based gyms lists these must have skills:

• 7 years of digital marketing strategy, platform development and content management experience, preferably with luxury brands or multi-channel retailers
• SEO experience – tactical and technical
• Experience creating content for digital mediums
• Knowledge, deep interest, and informed point of view regarding user design and experience, evolving tools, platforms and technologies in the digital space
• Experience developing digital content strategies centered around segmentation and personalization
• Ability to work cross-functionally with multiple stakeholders and manage an agency
• Expert enterprise-level, web-based applications, including CRM and CMS tools
• Ability to use digital analytics to identify trends, issues and opportunities

One Person Has to Know All That?

We’ve known for a long time now the digital economy requires a new kinds of workers to fill roles we’ve never seen before. Well, here we are. This is a field that is evolving more quickly that colleges can build curriculums around, so if you want to work in the profession, you may just have to hack it.

One of the ways to get informed might be to look at the courses like General Assembly, Udacity and LinkedIn Learning among many, many others. In many cases introductory classes are free and certificate classes are quick sprints.

So if this a field you’re building a career in, get busy.

Deep DX Learnings

This Nov. 14 to 16, at the Radisson Blu Aqua hotel in Chicago, CMSWire will sponsor three solid days of all-out discussion and introspection on the topics related to digital customer experience.

In addition to Petouhoff, DX Summit 2016 will feature Jeff Litvak. Director, Site Operations, Microsoft; Cynthia Holcomb, founder and CEO, Prefeye; Vab Dwivedi, director, Digital CX Optimization, Dell; Scott Brinker, co-founder and CTO, ion interactive; and Gerry McGovern, CEO, Customer Carewords.

We hope to see you there.