Lakshmi Mittra, VP and Head – Clover Academy

The ongoing pandemic and the resultant lockdowns have accelerated digital transformation for every enterprise across industries. As remote working and now hybrid working has become a part of our daily work routine, enterprises had to quickly adopt new-age digital technologies such as cloud, AI, Data Analytics and cybersecurity to equip their employees with effective hybrid workplaces.

Since digital technologies are essential ingredients for building successful hybrid workplaces, the demand for digital skillsets is evolving; new roles and responsibilities are cropping up in emerging technology to drive profitability and optimize resources.

Below mentioned are some of the skill sets that would alter the way organizations function:

Hybrid Cloud Transformation and Modernization Skills – Cloud computing has emerged as the biggest enabler for businesses during the time of pandemic. It has supported operations remotely and is now equipping hybrid workplaces. Industry leaders are predicting hybrid cloud to be the next biggest trend in cloud computing. Market Research Future expects the global hybrid cloud market size to reach USD 173.33 billion with a CAGR of 22.25% from 2019–2025. As hybrid cloud architecture becomes the foundation of the platform economy, some of the in-demand skill sets are centred around cloud transformation roadmap, architecture-driven modernization, mainframe modernization, cloud data modernization, APIfication, and transforming monoliths to microservices.

Cloud-native Development Skills – As the corporate world moves away from a monolithic architecture to microservices for faster and easy development and deployment of applications, demand for full-stack cloud practitioners and cloud integration architects skilled in Python, Ruby, Java, Node, etc are gaining momentum. Microservices architecture packed in containers and workloads managed by kubernetes deployed on scalable cloud infrastructure not only enhances the efficiency of applications but also improves the overall customer experience.

Cloud Security Skills – While the cloud has many benefits, it is not suitable for every part of a business’s IT infrastructure, applications, and workloads. For this reason, a hybrid work model is gaining popularity as it offers the collective benefits of on-premise, and public, and private clouds. However, maintaining the comprehensive security of this confluent IT infrastructure becomes difficult. The negative effect of the loss or breach of personal customer data or proprietary company intellectual property can be devastating for businesses from both a reputational and financial perspective. Hence, today the demand for cyber security experts who have a fair knowledge of how to operate in a hybrid cloud infrastructure is skyrocketing.

AI and ML Skills – AI and its subsets such as ML and Deep Learning are transforming every facet of business functions. Be it HR, accounting, sales or customer service, every function is integrating some form of AI into their operations to make them seamless and survive the growing evolution in the corporate landscape.

Edge computing Skills – Edge computing is becoming more prevalent, and it’s imperative for IT talent to learn the underlying skill sets to sustain this technology revolution. Edge computing is an architectural concept related to a larger paradigm called distributed computing. In a distributed computing architecture – network, storage and computing resources are spread across geographies. Since, large and centralized networks face an inherent problem of constrained bandwidth and latency, edge computing brings computing resources closer to the source of data. Furthermore, the advent of smart wearables powered by IoT technology (Internet of Things) made real-time data collection possible, thereby giving multiple use-cases for edge computing. The desired edge computing skill-sets involve the knowledge of system design, networking, database expertise and security in a distributed IT environment.

Also read: Reviving children’s life skills in the post-pandemic era