Many leading companies and start-ups in the technology domain have recently resorted to layoffs, job cuts, and scaling down of their workforce.

Though this has been a source of demotivation for employees, it has also brought to the forefront, the importance of getting re-skilled. Technology goes out of trend in a matter of months. It has therefore become imperative that employees move up their learning curve and adapt to industry changes.

They have started understanding the need to move out of their comfort zone in order to acquire new skills and technologies and secure their job.

According to statistics, more than 50 per cent of the total learners undertaking various courses are full-time employees aiming to re-skill themselves. Employees are now becoming more flexible and empowering themselves with newer software and skills.

Today, they can opt for various online, offline, and self-help courses to study in their free time. Such modules and programmes are specially designed to suit the technological and cross-skilling needs of software professionals. Courses such as AI, cyber security, machine learning, DevOps and digital marketing are highly popular among the IT professionals.

Data sciences: A course in data sciences can help with an arsenal of concepts in the toolkit for data acquisition, preparation, exploration, visualisation, and more. Be it a professional or a fresh graduate in any field, what is required is a working knowledge of mathematics and some programming experience to get started. This course provides an opportunity to build projects drawn from realworld problems and also showcase employees’ skills to potential employers. The data science bundle helps in mastering the Hadoop environment, python, predictive machine learning, and R, all together.

Big data: The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that there will be a shortage of 1.7 million big data professionals over the next three years. Add to this the fact that in another few years, more than half of the data in this world will move to Hadoop. A course in big data can help you achieve expertise in this and more. This course is for those aiming to become a big data developer and encompasses Hadoop, MapReduce, HBase, Hive, Spark, and Oozie. 

Machine learning: The idea of undertaking this course is to learn how to build and apply prediction functions with an emphasis on practical applications. It is applied in many areas, from medicine to advertising, and military to pedestrian. Machine learning can help when one needs to make sense of data.

Business analytics: This is the process of converting data into insights. It is “the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and fact-based management to drive decisions and actions.”The global research firm Gartner predicts that about 4.4 million new jobs will be created globally by business analytics.

DevOps: Training in devOps helps one in becoming a certified practitioner through hands-on training tools and best practices about continuous development, testing, configuration management. This includes continuous integration, deployment and finally monitoring of the software throughout its development life cycle. It is aimed any IT professional from the following backgrounds like systems admins, developers, testers, solutions architect, release engineers, and cloud professionals. 

Digital marketing: This is an interactive way of marketing products or services using digital technologies to reach the customers and retain them through various digital marketing techniques. Digital marketing is experiencing a tremendous growth in recent times. As a result, there is a continuous demand for advertisers, consumers, and employers. From being a single module, it has now become the main focus of every company’s marketing plan. And as a manager, one must know how digital media is affecting the company’s branding and sales and also how to stay ahead of competitors. A certification programme in this course can help a professional understand the different tools and technologies involved.

Not only do candidates get to learn the best practices in digital marketing, but also get an idea of social media marketing and planning, budgeting, reporting, and tacking mechanism used in digital marketing. Automation has created an urgent need for employees to re-skill themselves.

Getting trained in the latest and next-level technologies will get the required knowledge to collaborate in different ways in an organisation. Stay abreast with the technological advancements, differentiate anomalies from real path-breaking trends, and equip to work alongside it without getting lost.

(The writer is president and co-founder, Acadgild)