Obviously technical skills are important to progress in your digital marketer career path in 2025. Even as a generalist, you need to understand SEO, use GA4 to pull and analyze data, and create and schedule posts on social media platforms.
But many employers are now looking for soft or practical skills that they believe are ‘durable’ and essential for business growth – especially as AI can email list take over the more repetitive and basic tasks.
In fact, LinkedIn’s Global Marketing Jobs Outlook Fall report found that ‘human’ skills continue to gain importance. It named ‘collaborative problem-solving’ as the top marketing skill of the year – a growth of 138% since 2021.
“To make a mark in a business quicker, marketers need to brush up on their soft skills. Train yourself up in soft skills and be more purposeful about it. I think that will help you gain a competitive advantage,” said Mischa McInerney.
Expert tip: Create opportunities to cultivate soft skills – such as volunteering, using active listening, finding a mentor, participating in learning activities such as workshops or conferences, or taking a course like leadership and management or strategy.
Refine your AI skills
Marketing Week’s Language of Effectiveness survey discovered that:
- 46% of marketers already use AI for market research
- 44% use machine learning to produce different campaign assets
- 44% use it to optimize creative mid-campaign
This shows how widely adopted AI is across marketing for a range of tasks. In 2025, there’s a need to refine those skills and dig more deeply into tools that you find useful.
For example, suppose ChatGPT is helping speed up research for content, check existing content, or create blog outlines. Then you could experiment with the tool and learn how to create prompts to optimize your digital marketing strategy.
It’s also about the advantages of outsourcing services ensuring that AI upskilling is a team effort. While you may have an AI expert on your team for the more advanced tasks, it’s important for everyone to have working knowledge of the technology.
“There’s a need for everyone to upskill in the business for AI adoption to become more pervasive. For a company to use AI as a competitive advantage, everyone needs to have a certain level of skill, knowledge and a fluency in AI terminology to adapt it quicker,” stated Mischa McInerney.
Expert tip: Research the AI tools and platforms you use on a regular basis or want to start using. Follow experts on LinkedIn, read in-depth blogs, watch expert walkthroughs, or consider completing an advanced AI course.
You need to know more than just marketing
As a department, marketing needs to generate leads, raise brand awareness, and drive sales.
All of these will impact the bottom line global seo work and growth of a business. This means that modern marketers need to know more than just ‘marketing’.
Jim Lecinski believes it’s important to take the time to learn the fundamentals of marketing, but also learn how to drive growth for a business. If you’re stuck in the world of tactics or implementation, those are the jobs that are going to be automated.
“Marketers need to start getting savvy about the financial aspects of a business. A lot of marketers say, ‘I’m not a finance expert, I’m a marketer.’ If you’re in marketing, you need to understand finance. You also need to know the strategies that can drive incremental profitable growth,” stated Jim Lecinski.