Which Technical Skills are Relevant for your Career

Investing your time and money in learning is extremely important in today’s market and dynamics. Whatsoever we learn, there is always an objective of growing our knowledge, capabilities and skills; which are further categorized as technical skills and soft skills. Both types of skills are very important for our career but in this article, we are going to discuss only about technical skills.

Being associated with industrial training sector from more than 5 years, I have gone through the various seminars, workshops and counseling process of various students. There are mainly two types of technical profile in IT which are categorized as developer and administrator.

There are lots of software and technologies associated with these profiles in which we can build our career. Sometimes it becomes very confusing for us to choose the better option from plethora of choices available. In order to make this process easy, we have compiled a list of some technologies that are futuristic in nature.

AI & Machine Learning

If you are a student of engineering or have a technical background, then you may be aware of these technologies. Artificial Intelligence is the process of training the machines to act intelligently like humans by using various algorithms. Machine learning is a subset of AI that relies on devices making sense of a specific set of data. 

The goal of AI is to develop a system which can exhibit intelligent behavior, learn, think, understand, explain and behave just like humans. Some major applications of machine learning are gaming, image recognition, voice recognition, and robotics etc. From Alexa, Siri, and chatbots to self-driving cars, there are a ton of uses for this futuristic tech.

Netflix uses machine learning to make recommendations to its users. The explosive growth of Python has also been driven by the rise of AI and Machine learning. Hiring in the realm of AI has grown by 75% in last 3 years making it LinkedIn’s #1 emerging job.

Data Science & Analytics

Two consistently in-demand IT skills within Big Data include data science and data analytics. Most of the people think that both of these terms are similar to each other but data analytics is actually a subset of data science. There is a little bit of basic difference between the functionality of these technologies. Data science is a field that refers to the collective process, concepts, tools and technologies that enable the review, analysis and extraction of valuable information from raw data. Whereas data analytics is the process of examining the data sets in order to draw conclusion about the information they contain.

Being one of the applications of AI, data science is a blend of data analysis, algorithm development, and technology to solve analytically complex problems. The ultimate goal of data science is to use this data in creative ways to generate business value.

Tensorflow, OpenCV, and Neural Network are some basic skills many data scientists are learning today to advance their AI-based career strategies. Some major programming and tools used in these technologies are Python, R, MySQL, Hadoop, and Apache Spark.

Digital Marketing & Advertisement

With the continuous growth in use of internet and electronic devices, there is a lot of scope in the realm of digital marketing. This technical skill is not only limited to job perhaps it can also lead you more easily towards entrepreneurship. There are lots of chances to become self-employed or to start freelancing by learning the various disciplines of digital marketing.

The major advantage with this skill is that you can build career on various profiles based on SEO, PPC, online reputation management and social media marketing. You can also build the profile of graphic designer, web developer, and content writer in various sectors including IT and Entertainment. The major tools and technologies required to learn this skill are Google webmaster, keyword planner, HTML, CSS, and WordPress etc.

Blockchain

Blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable way. This is at the heart of bitcoin and other virtual currencies. The technology allows digital transformation to be distributed but not copied. That means each individual piece of data can only have one owner.

A simple analogy for understanding blockchain technology is GoogleDoc. When we craft a document and share it with a group of people, the document is distributed instead of copied or transferred. This creates a decentralized distribution chain that gives access of document to everyone at the same time.

Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT is an ecosystem of connected devices that are accessible through internet. The term IoT involves everything connected to the internet, but it focuses more on the objects that talk to each other. The functional aspect of IoT is to unite every object in such a manner that humans have the ability to control them via internet.

It is the future of communication that has transformed objects of the real world into smarter devices. Everything which is connected to the internet can be hacked, that’s why security is top concern with these devices. Hence the cyber security professionals with relevant knowledge of IoT will likely be highly sought after for this reason. 

Network & Cyber Security

Keeping networks secure is an inevitable responsibility of any organization that collects customer information or deals with sensitive data. It is very necessary for companies to secure data because it can cause them huge losses.

The number of data breaches is increased by 50% in previous years, making cyber security one of the most demanded technical skills. There are so many companies trying to conquer the shortage of people trained in the network security. It means there is a huge gap in market that you can fill and build a career where you can truly make an impact.

Cloud Computing / AWS

Cloud computing was introduced as the users needed more space to store data and files. This is simply a data center that is available over the internet. It is broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

AWS is one of the major cloud platforms, featuring more than 50 services including content delivery, database storage, and networking etc. The profile of AWS specialists mainly includes cloud architect and system administrators. With the inclination of more companies from classical server infrastructure to cloud solutions, jobs of cloud computing are on the rise. As per the data of various surveys, the market for public cloud services is projected to grow by 18-19%.

Mobile App Development

There are more than 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world today with continuous increase in numbers. Due to this rapid growth, the demand for mobile app developers has increased. The difference between a good application and bad application is recognized through its quality of user experience (UX). A good UX design is what separates successful apps from unsuccessful ones.

This technical skill also comes with the benefit that you can build and sell your own apps as well. So it’s an ideal career path for aspiring entrepreneurs and freelancers.

To kick-start your career, you need to pursue such in-demand IT skills to expand your knowledge and capabilities. Any of these technical skills will set on your way to a successful career in 2020 and beyond.

Based on our experience and research, we always suggest you to focus on two aspects while making your decision. First aspect of choice should be your passion and second aspect is the scope of that technology. Some of you have interest in coding or may be in hacking, robotics and other technical skills. So based on your capabilities, you can choose among the technologies written above.