Close-Up: Live Issue - Desperately seeking digital advertising talent.(Lee Wright appointed as managing director at Dare Digital)

In an understaffed and rapidly expanding industry, staff with experience in the sector are at a premium, Noel Bussey reports.

Mark Collier, the managing partner at Dare, believes he has pulled off a 'real coup' by appointing the former managing director of Grand Union, Lee Wright, as the managing director of his agency.

Collier knows that good, senior people with experience of digital marketing are hard to come by.

As an added bonus, Wright has a wealth of experience in recruitment, training and retaining staff. That experience will be vital to her new agency: the digital advertising industry is facing a near-crisis-level talent shortage.

At senior level, the effects of the dotcom crash are still being felt after many who were made redundant moved into different careers, thinking that they would never find digital work again.

Now that the industry is entering a second, more sustainable, boom period (figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau show that online spending hit pounds 1.4 billion in 2005), the dearth of available talent is becoming more obvious.

'The whole digital industry is growing at such a rapid pace,' Collier says. 'I'm not saying the talent isn't there, but the demand for staff is so great we're struggling to fill roles. We need more people to enter the industry.'