Tech skills to pick up for the new age

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of advanced technologies across the sectors. It has accelerated the digital transformation of the world. With the new normal, comes the focus on new skills and technologies.

India though has the largest youth population, is seeing a massive skill gap for jobs. The emergence of novel job opportunities in the market shall require candidates who can handle the technologies of the future. It has become essential for young minds to start adopting new tech skills, early in life, to succeed tomorrow.

The National Education Policy 2020 has emphasised on digital literacy and learning of new tech skills to produce holistic, skill-based degrees that will enable our students to be job-ready. Let us take a look at the top five tech skills that students shall need to prepare for the digital future:

Coding: Learning coding from a young age will enhance students' creative thinking and computational skills while also building their analytical and innovative thinking. Having mastered coding skills will also increase the employability quotient of students in the longer run.

Cloud computing: Open network that can make data accessible for all employees as well as secure the data from breaches is the need of the hour. To make business secure and seamless, organisations today are heavily investing in cloud computing technologies provided by IT firms. The growing popularity of IT services has resulted in an increase in demand for roles like cloud engineers, architects, infrastructure architects etc.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning: The industrial revolution 4.0 largely focuses on the automation of operations for complex as well as basic manual processes with the use of AI programmes and machine learning. Going forward, businesses shall seek AI experts and specialists who can help machines learn applications, allowing them to function independently. Acquired skills in advanced tech such as these shall help students crack opportunities in various sectors and not just IT.

Data science: Businesses rely on the insights derived from data and analytics. They track and study the consumer behaviour and improvise or tweak operations according to the data analysis. Data analysis plays a huge role behind the success of any organisation in today's world. Companies, both large enterprises as well as small and medium-sized enterprises, are looking to invest in data science today. Therefore, there is an excessive demand of skilled data science professionals but there has been a lack of quality force, as until today this subject was not given equal emphasis in the curriculum. Professionals with a degree in IT, computer science and some experience in data science will be the most sought after going ahead.

Robotics: Be it manufacturing, physical security or space exploration, the future is robotics. Machines replacing humans for several tasks has been the reality for quite some time and the same is expected, on a much higher level, in the future. The industrial revolution 4.0 shall help in the acceleration of the adoption of this new technology. The future holds scope for robotics engineer, RPA experts or robotics software engineer.

(The author is CEO and founder of an online learning platform)