Raja Renganathan

Have you ever wondered how a post-coronavirus-world might look like for your professional career? There are quite a lot of uncertainties. The 4th Industrial Revolution brought many advances to the business economy to rethink their strategic approach to leveraging technology and digitalization with the acceleration via Cloud-based services, AI, Robotics, Automation, and other new technologies. On the flip side, future of work/jobs manifests emergence of new skills in every facet of life. Enterprises are hyper accelerating their Digital Transformation including the naysayers of Pre COVID world; who are leading this from the front. Future of workplaces is likely to change and will force a major expectation and qualifications on the skills that are required to support the Digital Transformation.

Time to Rewire yourself to Support Digital landscape

The fundamental question is – are you prepared to support the digital landscape ahead? For those who want to stay relevant post pandemic era there is no doubt that acquiring new age Digital Skills needs to be a part of your professional development plan.

Every workforce is at the cross section of needing to leverage technical advances but must face the cultural and organizational changes and the changing ways of the market. To do this, workers need the Digital Skills to support the change. This also means, cognitive and social skills become more important, as well as imagination, critical thinking, and people-skills. Project management and application management become less critical, and in some cases, become automated. Many traditional skills become less valuable, or needed, as technology advances. Needless to say adaptability is critical in the ever-changing workplace with a continuous process of updating the skills as and when the technology changes and commitment to life long learning should be an integral part of the DNA.

In order to reskill yourself and your employees and be fully prepared for post COVID world, here are few “Digital Technology Skills” that are essential and likely to be in high demand to reinvent and rewire yourself, your business, face the world with confidence and navigating the digital shift.

Cloud Technologies such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform - Get Trained/Certified and hands-on experience one or more

Cloud Native Containers and Microservices such as Kubernetes, Docker, Apache, Mesos and Full Stack

Data Science/AI Machine Learning - Languages/Platforms such as Python, R, Java Scripting, ML Models and NLP

Data Analytics - Hadoop, NoSQL, Spark, HDFS, Mongo DB, Cassandra, Informatica and Search Indexes

IoT - Deep understanding of Sensors, User Interface and Raspberry Pi 

DevOps and Scrum including tools such as Jenkins, Nagios, Ansible, GitHub and its principles, operations and processes

SaaS Platforms such as but not limited to ServiceNow, Workday, Salesforce and Snowflake etc

Cyber Security – GRC, SIEM, Digital Forensics, Firewall IDS/IPS

Employee(s) who got laid off during the COVID period should/must have to use their time effectively to learn and equip themselves to some of the skill set prescribed and when the market opens in the new normal they can sell themselves with a premium of course. Several online tools, courseware and reference guides are available such as Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy, Lynda, edX, Udacity, Simplilearn, Edureka, Jigsaw Academy, Linux Academy, Codecademy, etc.

Attention Business Leaders (CIO, CTO, CHRO, CLO)

Businesses should encourage employees along with rolling out incentive programs; and provide a platform for learning to acquire the above said mentioned skills. They should go to an extent of creating a Lab; be it Cloud Center of Excellence or Digital Center of Excellence within their organizations so that employees go thru a hands-on experience in addition to the Training and Certification they were offered. Certification alone is not going to make them a pro. Several businesses have leap frogged this initiative and have started to reap benefits.