Contributed by: Yasharth Singh Tarkar
Introduction
Technological advancement over the years has changed the face of the IT industry. It is evolving at a rapid rate, enabling faster development and progress so, getting to know in-demand skills can make you stand out. Emerging technologies have reduced the product development time significantly from years to months and months to weeks with no compromise in the quality.
Industries have now started realizing the importance of digital transformation and acceleration in business to stay ahead in the game.
The technological revolution has reached around the world, and it’s not only the technological trends and the evolution of top technologies, but a lot has changed in the last two years with the outbreak of COVID – 19 making everyone realize that things will not be the same anymore. New technologies will come up, making the old ones obsolete, which makes it absolutely essential for the working professions to keep learning, unlearning, and relearning.
5 Most in-demand skills
Here are five of the most in-demand skills employers are looking for in 2024.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a big shift from the way IT resources were utilized in the business. It is the delivery of on-demand computing services, i.e., from application deployment to data storage and processing over the internet on the “pay-as-you-go” basis with round-the-clock availability without worrying about the capital expense of buying the underlying hardware and set-up.
Another benefit of using cloud computing services is the scalability capability. Scaling-up or scaling-down as needed in just a few clicks is what makes the industries across the domains migrate from in-house infra to cloud with no compromise to the security of the confidential data. Moreover, the cloud system keeps data back-up, disaster recovery, and business continuity easier as it mirrors the data on multiple redundant data centers across different geographical locations.
With big players entering in this field like Amazon (AWS – Amazon web services), Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP – Google cloud platform), jobs on many different roles are generated like:
a.) Cloud Solution Engineer
b.) Cloud Architect
c.) Cloud infra Engineer
d.) Cloud QA Engineer
Data Science
Data science was crowned as the “sexiest job of the 21st century,” and it continues to evolve as one of the most promising and in-demand career paths for skilled professionals. It has positively contributed to industries across many domains ranging from Banking, finance, healthcare, IT, energy, media, etc. It not only has touched upon almost all the fields but is continuously proliferating.
Data Science is an amalgamation of statistical and mathematical tools, algorithms, and machine learning principles with an aim to discover hidden patterns from raw data and further deducing decisions and predictions.
Data is everywhere and expanding. Numerous terms like data mining, exploratory data analysis, data cleaning are often used interchangeably, creating job positions like Data Engineer, Data Analyst, and Data Scientist.
Glassdoor ranked Data Scientist as the #1 Best Job in the USA. As data is increasing exponentially, the demand to process it rises, which means more data scientists in the industries, and it shows no signs of slowing down in the forthcoming years.
Big Data
The enormous increase in data over the years is what has given birth to big data. The amount of data we produce on a daily basis is astonishing. Big data has resulted in the emergence of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Cloud computing.
But what really has caused the generation of this colossal amount of data?
Here are a few interesting facts about big data:
a. With more than 3.7 billion internet users, Google processes 40,000 searches every second across the world.
b. Social media certainly fuels data creation. Every minute, Snapchat users share 527,760 photos, YouTube users watch 4,146,600 videos, and Twitter users share 456,000 tweets. 1.5 billion people are active on Facebook every day.
All of the above has accounted for a humongous amount of data generated. In fact, 95% of the entire data was generated in the last two years, including 44 zeta bytes of data in 2020 alone, and by 2025, the amount of data generated is expected to reach 460 Exabyte.
Companies have started realizing the importance of data and data processing, which makes data engineers, Big Data and Analytics engineers, Big data spark professionals’ jobs one of the most in-demand skills in 2024.
Full-Stack Development
A Full-Stack developer is the one who is required to work on all the engineering stacks of the software product development.
From development to deployment, a full-stack engineer (or FSE) needs to accomplish the arduous task of including the skills of all the application development layers.
a.) The Front-end
The front end or the user interface of the application is also called the presentation layer. Front-end technologies are becoming more prominent in today’s time because, unlike the legacy times where a major part of the testing was done around the functionality, today the equal focus is on the user experience as well.
The FSE needs to learn the skills in front-end technologies like HTML, JQuery, CSS, JavaScript, frameworks, and libraries like Angular and React.js.
b.) Back-end
This layer is also called the Business layer. It processes the data sent from the front-end as per the designed business logic and stores it programmatically in the database. FSE needs to have skills like Java or Python, or PHP in their arsenal.
c.) Database
It encapsulates the data part of the application. CRUD operations like create, read, update, delete from the blueprint of the complete database management system or DBMS. To engineer this layer of software development, a developer needs to be skilled in the operational functionalities of database management tools and languages like SQL, PL-SQL, Oracle, MySQL, etc.
d.) DevOps
DevOps or development and operations is a discipline of developing and delivering the application by deploying on the underlying platform.
The Job role of a full-stack engineer is not just writing codes but deploying the code on the maintained infrastructure.
Cybersecurity
As we flow further in the digital era, the want for cyber protection has emerged as quintessential. Today, more than ever, companies are investing heavily in preventing their product and company from cybercrime.
With increasing cybercrimes, all businesses are potential prey, regardless of their reputation, which makes cybersecurity inevitable.
Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing fields, and cybersecurity experts are expected to build a secure digital ecosystem for which employers are ready to pay more to professionals who are equipped with the required skills.
Within cybersecurity, the two fastest-growing skills are application development security and cloud security. Both involve proactively building secure systems and responding to malicious cyber attacks.
Demand for cybersecurity is projected to increase by 180 per cent by 2025.
In a nutshell
So that concludes our glance at some of the top employability skills. Irrespective of what stage of your career you’re at, you could definitely benefit from learning these skills.
The year 2024 is a technology-driven market that necessitates some hands-on experience, so you can fit the requirements competently. We are still recovering from the pandemic, and so is the world. We don’t know what lies ahead, but we can be prepared.
So prepare yourself in these domains to boost your chances of securing your dream job.
