Adobe on board for new Swinburne’s new technology course

Swinburne University’s digital studies course aims to fill a shortage in the technology jobs market.

Swinburne University student Mia Charles is doing a digital and technology major and communications degree. Picture: David Geraghty

Marketing and communications students looking to reinforce their careers in the online space will have an industry advantage if they study at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology, which has launched a world-first digital studies course in conjunction with Adobe.

The digital advertising technology major, which is part of the marketing and communications degree but can be taken by other undergraduate students, is being launched with a 40-student cohort after a trial last year.

Design school dean Professor Scott Thompson-Whiteside says the course has been created in conjunction with Adobe to teach students how to use its marketing cloud. The Adobe marketing cloud is a software system which allows digital analysis of web usage on personal and desktop devices, what people access and what their interests are, to personalise advertising and better collect industry data. Almost like learning how to become Big Brother.

While the course is about understanding and applying technology which is becoming widely used in the business and marketing community to tailor advertising to individuals, Thompson-Whiteside says the course has been designed to bring students up to date with industry advancements.

“The partnership with Adobe really covers two key areas for us — the development of graduates who are capable of understanding the Adobe marketing cloud and can respond to the changing nature of the marketing industry,” Thompson-Whiteside says. “It’s a multichannel communications tool that tells a much more detailed story about customer experiences.”

The digital pulse survey undertaken by the Australian Computer Society with Deloitte Access Economics predicts there will be a shortage of up to 100,000 in­formation communications and technology workers over the next five years. The university sector has been unable to keep up with demand.

While the Swinburne course is not an information technology course, aimed at engineers or budding software designers, it has a heavy technology component as part of the degree and means students who might have studied traditional marketing will be learning IT skills and applications.

Adobe’s public sector managing director Tony Katsabaris says digital advancements are leading to great societal changes, and there is a need to equip students with the skills to help industries adapt.

“There is not an industry on the planet that is not being disrupted by digital, whether it’s financial services or the media,” Katsabaris says.

He says a person’s attention span is now less than 10 seconds, and by using analytics of what they are clicking on, marketers can tailor advertising to their interests.

Katsabaris says 12 of the top 20 ASX-listed companies were using the Adobe marketing cloud to analyse what their clients and customers are interested in. By capturing those analytics and selling non-identifiable data to other companies, they can tailor services better. That could mean banking clients wanting to buy a car and tailoring ads to that.

“Five years ago if you were doing marketing you would learn product, placement, promotion, price,” he says.

Thompson-Whiteside says the partnership with Adobe and training students in its marketing cloud includes placements in Australia’s top companies.

Students will be learning practical internet analytics and using software that people with decades of marketing experience have not been trained in.

“We come in as education providers, while we’re using Adobe marketing cloud to enhance our student experience, we know there’s incredible demand out there from clients like News Corp and NAB,” Thompson-White says.

“There’s so much demand coming from Adobe’s clients that they’re talking to us about taking their students after placements in a part-time capacity until they graduate. It’s an amazing opportunity to get corporate experience in a contemporary space.”

Crunching the numbers for a digital future

Mia Charles is “a massive people person”, and has set her sights on working in a big business doing marketing, strategy and communications.

The Melbourne student, 18, will have an advantage over many other marketing students when she graduates in four years time as one of the first to study the Adobe marketing cloud system in a new digital advertising technology course offered in Swinburne University of Technology’s marketing and communications degree.

“We’re going into such a digital age,” Charles says. “Instead of doing advertising to decide what it was like I thought I’d do digital advertising.”

Charles knows the generation gap is growing and Gen X and Baby Boomer workers are less likely to have a great understanding of data analytics in advertising, marketing and communications. She knows the degree includes a lot of information technology skills and how they can be tailored to the industry, which will give her an understanding of how social media works.

“The generation gap is very big and what has changed has been quite rapid,” she says. “There are going to be generations younger than me that aren’t going to know what it was like to have a newspaper. I was talking to someone who said they used to do all of their advertising in the papers, and now you look up your phone from anywhere around the world ... all the advertising is done on the web.”

Charles says the degree will put her in a business headspace, with a corporate-level understanding of the cloud. Charles says personalised advertising will soon be normal, with better targeted marketing from those who analyse trends rather than creating campaigns.