by Saurabh Hooda, co-founder of Hackr.io
The job market has become a quickly changing playground, highly influenced by the technological advances. Since technology has been taking long strides recently, so did the job market in response. It’s becoming more of a necessity to re-sharpen your skill set and expand your toolkit, often for the sake of surviving these changes.
There will always be the debate over whether technology is destroying or creating new jobs, while in fact, it has to be doing both. According to a recent study, technology is destroying meaningless laborious jobs and creating meaningful ones instead. The rates of agricultural workers, for example, has drastically fallen since the late 80s, and the rate of educational workers has increased, in some fields with over 500%.
However, your question might not be one about survival. What if you want to catch the rising tide at its peak, and drop a few fading IT skills for the sake of new hot ones? Well, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a list of the hottest IT skills to pick up, and a few mentions of those who are fading away.
Machine Learning.
Machine learning is arguably the hottest topic right now. It’s being applied in almost every single industry out there, and whoever is looking for competitive advantage is looking to achieve that through A.I. and machine learning. Machine learning is the branch of A.I. where everything cool’s happening. The theories and algorithms are continuously expanding with this growing new branch of science. A careful look at its history will tell just how far machine learning has come.
Humans learn and reach mastery through a combination of progressive self-correcting training and trial and error. The idea behind ML is that we can bring machines to learn as well the same way humans do. And this is just the beginning, the real race manifesting between all major A.I. and machine learning researchers, is who reaches artificial general intelligence first, since whoever gets there first will be a major stakeholder in the future of humanity. It is said that A.I. will create over 2 million jobs by 2020.
If you want to start learning this track, you better get yourself well acquainted with different branches of mathematics and most preferably, python or R. They will really help you climb the ladder fast in terms of growth and skill set.
Cloud skills.
Cloud computing and services are going to become the new foundation of the business world. The world of shared resources and the opportunities of borderless computational, storage and application power is limitless. It’s a way for every IT business and service to grow beyond the limits of its resources, be cost efficient as much as possible, and probably deliver higher quality products to the market in a scalable and reliable fashion.
It’s worth noting that the cloud skills that one can learn spread over multiple categories, from cloud architects, cloud developers, and operations to cloud sales, administrators and consultants.
A good way of starting this path is to get familiar with the cloud world and how everything ticks within its realm, then move onto getting versatile in one of its systems, like earning an Amazing Web Services Certification.
Data Science.
We’re generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, this number will potentially increase exponentially over the coming years. The real competition starts in managing this tremendous amount of data, and convert it to wisdom – a set of strategies and actions upon which the business evolves and moves toward prosperity.
If Youtube was not reading through the petabytes of data it possesses, and a thousand gigabytes of user’s playlists and preferences, they wouldn’t have been able to recommend videos that hook you up for hours on their website. The same thing goes for Netflix, Google, Facebook and basically any business that wants to stay ahead.
It goes beyond targeting customers in an effective and efficient manner, to understanding and even predicting the life cycle of a business, monitor its performance and take correcting course of action. There’s currently a shortage of data science talents. Estimates say that the U.S market alone needs over 150,000+ talent with deep analytical skills, and another million managers and analyst with data science skills.
Sign up for a data science course as this is the best time to pick up a career in data science.
Cybersecurity and digital forensics.
The digital world is not a very safe place to be. Exploits, data leaks, and entities getting hacked is a very common scheme. It’s a man-made system, so it’s prone to error and hackers excel at finding these errors and turning the tables around. This is why Cybersecurity and digital forensics are becoming a major opportunity and challenging field to make the digital world a safer place. With over 46% of the human population now connected to the internet, and the growing digital economy. A high percentage of cyber attacks result from simple mistakes that eventually end up costing a lot.
Fading skills.
Data Entry jobs will soon be obsolete as we attempt to automate these monotonous tasks, Machine learning is heading towards taking over similar jobs, so the job is deemed to die within the coming few years.
Computer operators are also threatened by the accelerating technology. Speech recognition and NLP improved dramatically, and it’s not a far-off reach fantasy that software like Siri and Cortana will take over the operators frontier and bridge the gap between humans and machines even further.
There are actually languages that are dying in the programming world and they too may face extinction. Perl for example used to be high on the list of popularity, but has started to drop ever since 2012. It’s continuously losing its ground to server maintenance tools and as far as simple scripting goes, Python is stealing the lights. Perl isn’t the only dying language out there, .Net, Objective-C, Cobol, are becoming languages of the past. What’s still finding its relevance in the industry is C, C++ and Java. Holding still a majority of the crowd, there is a decent crowd willing to learn C++ over the newer languages.
Summary.
Technology evolves exponentially, that’s why we should be adapting to these changes as quickly as we can. It’s just the nature of civilization that certain jobs and skills go obsolete as new ones arise. It might not be an easy idea to pick up a new career or a new skill, but when you put thought and effort into it, the path is definitely rewarding at the end.
Saurabh Hooda has worked globally for telecom and finance giants in various capacities. After working for a decade in Infosys and Sapient, he started his first startup, Lenro, to solve a hyperlocal book-sharing problem. He is interested in product, marketing, and analytics. His latest venture Hackr.io recommends the best Android tutorial and online programming courses for every programming language.
