COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way people work. With digitalization, advanced nature of working style, and automation on rise, new talent and skills in demand are being explained by some of the top skill employment-suggesting firms, Upwork, and LinkedIn.
Catherine Fisher, Senior Director, Content, Media and Experiences, wrote on the official blog of LinkedIn, “Cloud and distributed computing has remained in the #1 spot for the past two years and is the Top Skill on almost every list — including France, Germany, India, Ireland, Singapore, the U.S., and Spain.” Infact, Upwork, the largest freelancing website of the world came to the conclusion that the fastest-growing category is Data Science, while Machine Learning became the fastest-growing skill. But why? The simple answer is demand generated through remote work culture, but the elaborate answer is explained here.
Data-driven decision making and challenge to organize data is the need of the hour
Talking specifically about data science first, the question is where is the demand rooting from? The answer is the company's need for decision making on the basis of data. More firms are using data science so as to create algorithms which can maximize profits and help in improving customer satisfaction.
The huge amount of data produced across the world remains unstructured, but has an enormous potential of value-addition for organizations. The databases are hosted mostly on the cloud platforms. Therefore, there is a rising interest of firms in distilling insights from such enormous data.
Likewise, cloud computing skills have become more important in COVID era because the firms are migrating from traditional to contemporary cloud-based apps. Firms have raised their cloud computing demand to tap into solutions which offer affordability, efficiency and connectivity, apart from great UX, from anywhere and at any time.
Most valuable skill sets in demand
From the demand arises the need of skill sets required by firms. Some of the most valuable ones are-
- Cloud security skills with proactive monitoring, security layers
- Data science expertise with high aptitude in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
- Migration knowledge since more companies are moving apps to cloud
- Programming and database language skills (such as R and Python, and SQL, MySQL, MongoDB, respectively) for performing complicated data analysis with the help of few codes
- DevOps for consistent refinement along with implementation through tasks like testing, deployment, monitoring and integration
- Learning access to data crunching tools like Google Analytics
- Data visualization through Tableau, Power Bi for the purpose of business intelligence
Data science and cloud computing- top skills for 2021 and times ahead
The growth trajectory of data science and cloud computing skills in the present market is indicating north. COVID-19 is still the big story and the demand for cloud computing and data scientists doesn’t seem to slow down in the nearest sight. As for the firms migrating to remote work setup, the need for the hour is to operate through a vision of three vital factors- resilience, anticipation and preparation.
