Respondents posted the lowest scores for digital channels that might be considered more technical, such as search and email, while the highest scores came for strategy, content and customer experience.

Senior staff will be pleased to know that they are outscoring their junior colleagues overall – but only just.

Junior employees scored 65% on average compared to 70% for mid-level staff and 73% for those in senior positions.

Average score for seniority

Base size = 554 for junior, 1,688 for mid-level and 1,336 for senior

The Digital Skills Index survey is still live so why not take the test yourself to see how you measure up?

And if you’re looking to assess your team’s digital marketing skills then get in touch with our Digital Transformation team to find out more at transformation@econsultancy.com.

What is the assessment?

The assessment is split into 10 disciplines – advertising, content, customer experience, data analytics, ecommerce, email, mobile, search, social, strategy & operations.

Your score will be benchmarked against those of your peers so you have an idea of where your strengths and weaknesses lie.

Email and search specialisms

As mentioned, content and customer experience achieved the highest scores across the board, which might come as a surprise as these are digital marketing terms that have come into fashion quite recently compared to email and search.

It’s perhaps indicative of the fact that in reality brands have always focused on content marketing and customer experience, and it’s just the buzzwords that are new.

But this doesn’t mean that there’s not more to be learnt in this field. Check out our recent Masters of CX series of reports to learn from the experts about the new keys to outstanding customer experience. 

Getting back to the Skills Index, the lowest scores were achieved in search marketing, with senior level employees posting the top score with just 49%.

In this chart, the red bar (‘average of score’) is the actual score respondents achieved while the blue bar (‘average of prediction’) is what users thought their level of knowledge was prior to the test.

Average score for search marketing by seniority

Email was equally low with an average score of 54% for senior-level employees, 52% for mid-level and 46% for junior.

One might take from this that search and email are more technical skills so companies need to consider recruiting staff that specialise in these areas or consider outsourcing this activity.

So, which sector is most knowledgeable?

I’m sure you’re intrigued to know how your industry measures up against other sectors.

This chart shows the average scores by sector, revealing that those in real estate are apparently the most knowledgeable, while those in agriculture might benefit from attending some of our digital training courses.

Average score by sector (click to enlarge)