Hypothesis
My original hypothesis was that CMOs would have a relatively broad set of skills, and would major in marketing and sales, and minor in something like communications and brand. If there were industry skills they would be one or two skills at the most.So a skill set might look something like;
Marketing, Sales, Account management, Communications, Brand, Industry
Method
First I searched for people who were listed on LinkedIn as either “CMO” or “Chief Marketing Officer” as their job title. Using a profiling tool, I extracted the skills of over 700 profiles, creating more than 10000 skills, across the UK, the US, Australia and India. If I had more time I might grow this to cover more countries, and in more depth, but for now, it provides a strong enough set of data. Also, I didn’t control for quality of organisation or profile. So there could be a few people claiming to be a CMO without that being the case.
