Acquiring Digital skills for Next Gen careers

By Vijay K Thadani

Cars sans drivers, Ice and Coffee makers that are programmed to do their jobs—serve us chilling cold and sizzling hot—without any intervention on our part, devices that read ECGs and X-rays without a doctor being present and robots that cook hamburgers and dispense drugs in hospital pharmacies—are all now a reality in our world.

An outcome of the Digital revolution that is driving and transforming life, Automation, (which is the biggest pillar of this movement), is impacting not only our personal space, but also our workplace. Automation today has come to be synonymous with technologies such as Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, which are completely altering the manner in which familiar activities are performed. Tasks that were once done by humans are now being executed by machines in the modern, 21st century Digital environment.

A recent research by business intelligence Think Tank McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) shows that almost 60 percent of current-day occupations have at least 30 percent of constituent activities that can be automated! According to MGI, Automation can raise productivity growth on a global basis by as much as 0.8 to 1.4 percent annually and enable organizations to create a competitive edge and differentiators based on better quality and lower downtime.

Examples of this abound. Take the instance of Amazon, which claims that its employees can pick and pack three times as many products per hour owing to the support of robots. Due to Artificial Intelligence, in a lab test, computers were able to read lips with 95 percent accuracy, beating professional human lip readers who only managed 52 percent accuracy.

Therefore, quite obviously, Automation will continue to gain greater momentum and traction and play a more important role within offices and factory shop floors as its advantages become more and more visible.

And it is not Automation alone. Digital encompasses a host of other technologies that are becoming ubiquitous and mainstream. The term SMAC, which stands for Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud, encompasses all the transformational forces that are at work in the present age. In the last decade we have seen the immense proliferation of these technologies alongside others like Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, nanotechnology, 3D printing, etc. and the gradual shift they are causing in the world of work.

Notwithstanding the benefits of Digital and the array of technologies that it stands for, the fact is that the trend is expected to unleash challenges for today’s workers, compelling them to shape up (Digitally) or ship out. Simply interpreted it means that Digital requires a new breed of people with an all new set of skills that enable them to interface with these technologies and become more relevant to the Digital scenario. This is because people and machines are expected to work together in the new age organization.

In the view of India’s industry pundits, companies allocating almost 50 percent of their IT budgets on new Digital revenue streams by 2020, will create an unprecedented demand for over one million newly trained Digital professionals in the country. This is obviously a compelling story.

Talent in requisite numbers which is committed to DT, is therefore the need of the hour. It is what enterprises require to develop a robust and supportive eco-system for furthering and fueling the DT trend. While they may have set up significant DT infrastructure on their turfs, it is meaningless without a workforce that can handle Digital technologies.

This is important as according to Accenture, the smarter use of Digital skills, technologies and other assets could boost productivity and generate USD 2 trillion of additional economic output globally by 2020!

If DT skills are an impediment as well as crucial requirement, then they are the resource that has to be put in place first. Countries have to create a vast pool of trained DT professionals and enterprises have to upskill their employees with key Digital skill sets.

A research by India’s IT-BPM industry spearhead NASSCOM indicates that the sector, which currently employs around four million people will need an additional 1.2-2 billion employees to maintain existing growth momentum and achieve its targeted revenue goal of USD 100 billion by 2025. To get here, and in order to keep pace with the automation of the sector, up to 40 percent of the workforce will need to be reskilled in technology, domain, social and thinking.

Armed with this right mix of upskilled, repurposed employees—basically Pi-Shaped people who can work on multiple platforms, interface with design colleagues and drive Digital innovation—organizations can deal with the evolving DT requirements of their clients.

The Digital age is throwing up new job profiles and in the future, career seekers will have to align themselves with these new work opportunities. Profiles such as Digital Leaders, Digital Innovators, Digital Developers, Digital workers and Digital citizens will all need people who have different levels of skills. Within enterprises, employees will have to scale their capabilities and reskill by undergoing special DT training programs. They must rid themselves of complacency, remove the rust that envelops them and scale their existing knowledge. Their focus must be on remaining employable, relevant and valuable to their employers.

Individuals wishing to build careers in the DT realm will have to be made aware of its high potential in terms of remuneration. News is that DT professionals are likely to draw salaries that are at least 50-60 percent higher than the industry average!

And yes, there are institutions in India today that can help young people and professionals to equip themselves with DT skills. Candidates can take up BTech Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) program which emphasizes on Digital Transformation technologies with a view of making available Next Gen digitally skilled engineers to the IT industry. Powered by a project-based learning methodology, a well-rounded BTech CSE program is embedded with a Full Stack Programming, Big Data, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (IOT) curriculum to make it more industry relevant.

The other area that has to be pushed is entrepreneurship. Recognizing that there is a thrust on start-ups in India, progressive educational institutes are now grooming their students to be job creators rather than job seekers. Incubators is the new trend in Universities encouraging students to come up with winning entrepreneurial ideas. This has given shape to many successful start-ups that have been incubated in the NIIT University campus including PeerXP Technologies, SpectroSmart, AT-Lead, among others.