Last week we asked publishing chief executives what their predictions were for 2012. The comments were broadly similar of course: digital would rise as print declines: Amazon would become more dominant but new competitors will rise: new skills must be developed around brand amplification, data management and how to publish on multiple platforms.

What was clear from the comments is that while most of the changes are inevitable, how we respond to them is not a given.  One area the industry now needs to get right is how it recruits, who it recruits, how much it pays those it seeks to recruit, and how it trains them once they have arrived.

For as long as I've reported on the publishing sector it has tended to fall short in most of those areas. And while the industry raised its game during the noughties, there is now an urgent necessity to raise it further.

For years we've fretted that good staff might migrate to games companies, broadcasters, or internet developers, but the bigger worry now is that those companies might migrate into publishing - some already have.

Anthony Forbes Watson, Pan Macmillan managing director, said "publishing will start its migration from being an industry for arts graduates who can count, into an industry for science graduates who can write a paragraph". He added: "It's a cultural shift."

Gail Rebuck, chairman and chief executive Random House UK, said: "With the importance of the digital future, we are very excited about getting all our staff engaged in that, for a long time now we have been working to engage people, working on reskilling, training and developing new skills in the organisation, balanced with a much more focused approach in developing direct contact the consumer."

Tom Weldon, Penguin UK c.e.o., said: "We need to be completely clear sighted about what new skills we must develop quickly and I would particularly emphasise the following:  truly imaginative digital storytelling (especially in the children's area), managing data, dynamic pricing, brand amplification (and at Penguin we are very fortunate to have a real consumer brand), publishing authors on multiple platforms, shifting from a display to a discovery marketing model, creating a halo of recommendation and engagement for the reader, developing our own IP, and becoming even more ambitious and selective about what content we bring to market."

I don't subscribe to Forbes Watson's colourful view that we need to recruit "science graduates who can write a paragraph" but we do need to find people who love the art of writing but understand how it becomes meta data, and we need to re-train existing staff to be dedicated digitalists as they have been passionate publishers.

As Weldon concluded: "None of this will be easy but what an extraordinarily interesting time to be working in publishing."