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Marketing is moving at a blistering pace. In the past two decades, digital technologies have supercharged the industry’s evolution and propelled it into a moment as rife with challenges as it is with opportunity. 

Today, businesses and marketers are in a never-ending race to catch up with a flood of new channels and a growing set of tools. All while fielding a crowded market and swaying consumer needs. The dizzying pace of change in an industry that’s becoming increasingly digitized and data-driven is swelling skills gaps and leaving many on the verge of falling behind. 

The good news? Change is not new to marketing. It’s what defines it. Marketing’s evolution can be chronicled through disruptions and innovations. And marketers have long thrived on their ability to adapt on the fly and leverage new mediums, trends, and technologies to move forward and push the envelope.

If we’ve learned anything from the “Great Resignation,” it’s that today’s workforce is fed up with the status quo. Beyond the ongoing flexibility debate over work-from-anywhere or work-from-the-office, today’s talent is laser-focused on diversity. Motivated by purpose alongside (and perhaps even more so than) money, today’s tech talent is tired of companies who say that diversity and inclusion, work-life balance, and empowering team cultures are important to them. They want to see the specific and tangible benchmarks in place to measure a company’s DEI progress.

If businesses want to attract more diverse junior tech talent, they need to move beyond talking the diversity talk, to walking the inclusion walk. The good news? Building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce isn’t only good for a company’s reputation, it’s good for a company’s bottom line. In a recent McKinsey study, one-third of companies that improved DEI efforts over the past five years are now financially outperforming their industry peers. 

Considering that the US Labor Department reported in March that there were 2 positions open for every employee, diversifying the workforce isn’t only vital at the recruitment level of talent management, but crucial for employee retention overall. One of the top reasons employees have cited for leaving their jobs is a company’s failure to fulfill promises to improve DEI efforts. There’s a veritable chasm between employer perception and employee reality when it comes to cultivating workplace culture. Just look at the Accenture study which found that while 68% of leaders felt they created an empowering team culture, only 36% of employees agreed with them.

We’re at a turning point in our world—and in talent. Employers are struggling to fill roles across sectors, and the talent shortage will only continue as the economy becomes increasingly digital. The pandemic has accelerated the need for digital skills and normalized remote work. Meanwhile, the Great Resignation is underway, workers are seeking opportunities that better support their lifestyles, and workforce diversity and inclusion objectives are critical.

How can companies evolve their talent strategies to adapt to these circumstances?

Community reskilling is one powerful option for tackling these challenges head-on. These initiatives involve companies forming public-private partnerships to source, train, and hire non-traditional candidates from underserved communities—often with the help of a reskilling partner like General Assembly. We just launched an in-depth whitepaper on the topic—download it here.

In our last posts, we shared the hidden opportunities within the Great Resignation and advice from culture expert Bob Gower on building cultures that survive the talent churn. In our most recent webinar, we brought together real leaders to share their greatest tips for seizing this moment to create the strongest, most productive teams — and the most loyal employees. 

A level playing field

With the Great Resignation, there’s a new power dynamic in town. Employees are re-prioritizing, looking to new careers and internal mobility to help them grow and find meaning. As you get used to this new landscape, there are many benefits to be received — not only for workers, but for the companies they serve.

In our last post we talked about how leaders should rethink their approach to the Great Resignation. In this post, we’ll discuss how leaders can build positive cultures while everyone is quitting. We sat down with culture expert, Bob Gower, who has spent the bulk of his career working with leaders to create effective teams, to get his advice on building cultures that survive the wave of resignations. 

The cultural causes of the Great Resignation

To understand the Great Resignation, leaders need to get to the heart of why employees are quitting. The COVID-19 pandemic reminded employees that they have a choice in where they work and how they spend their time.

“The power has often been in the hands of management or of companies,” Gower explained. “The Great Resignation is both people reevaluating themselves and taking power over their lives.” 

Since early 2021, employees have been leaving their jobs in record numbers, and businesses around the globe experiencing this ‘Great Resignation’ have struggled to survive. As the COVID-19 pandemic begins to improve and life slowly gets back to normal, a record number of job openings threaten a range of industries, which don’t have enough skilled employees to fill those roles. 

A recent study of 9,000,000 global employees from 4,000 businesses revealed two key insights into which employees are leaving and why:

• Resignation rates are highest among mid-career employees. With long careers ahead of them and the experience to know their worth, these employees are in strong positions to create the careers they want. This has created a demand for change: rejection of burnout culture, new standards for how they spend their valuable time and effort, and a hunger for meaning — leading in-demand talent to go freelance, change careers, return to school, or invest in long-term goals and wellbeing.
• Resignations are highest in the tech and healthcare industries. This makes sense for health workers, who have been under pressure during this pandemic that is unprecedented in our lifetimes. But the tech side shows another story: COVID-19 provided massive disruption in the way we work in tech, including less in-office bonding, more flexibility in working conditions, and greater autonomy over our time. Employers’ already-huge demand for talent was magnified to survive the accelerated digital transformation, making more lucrative opportunities available to tech talent.

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In our last post, we talked about what a learner striving to enter a high-paying and hard-to-fill role in tech needs on their reskilling learning journey.

Today, I want to shift the focus to the other side of that equation. Let’s look at a few key trends happening in the employer landscape:

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Houston, we have a talent problem. It’s no secret that leaders have been struggling to fill skills gaps since the onset of the digital revolution.

But the pandemic and subsequent Great Resignation have sent that trend into hyperdrive: According to a 2021 report from Gartner, a third of job skills that were in-demand just a few short years ago are now obsolete.

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Over the last 10 years, we’ve built incredible partnerships with enterprise businesses focused on creating real impact inside and outside their communities. We’re excited to introduce you to the Accelerate program — a coalition that brings Microsoft together with local community, business, and civic partners in several cities around the US. Through Accelerate, GA is able to provide scholarships for several of our technology tracks to students from underserved communities and those impacted by COVID-19.

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There’s a tectonic shift taking place in today’s workforce. Facing burnout, safety concerns, and a general feeling that it’s time to rethink what really matters, workers across industries are taking bold steps toward career change. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 2.9% of the workforce left their jobs in August 2021, and just one month later, an additional 4.4 million Americans quit. The Great Resignation needs no introduction. 

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