Stop Coding! Start Data Mining!

For decades now, IT professionals have had successful, rewarding careers. If you knew how to code, jobs were aplenty and your future was secure. But the IT world is no longer the paradise it once was. Companies are cutting back and reducing the IT spend. They are asking the IT professionals they haven’t yet laid off, to re-engineer themselves to meet the demands of the ‘Millennium Trends’ or SMIC, that is transforming and revolutionizing the business world ( (SMIC is an acronym for social platforms, mobile applications, information (or Big Data) & cloud computing).

Indeed, as the past has always shown us, a paradigm shift in the priorities of a company will always lead to a shift in the talent skills they need. We are already seeing the effects of SMIC and the many ways it is forcing organizations to do things differently. Mainframe jobs have shrunk significantly and organizations are all are shifting their priorities to data backed initiatives. This inadvertently also forces their workforce to learn new skills, thus empowering them to understand and successfully use these new technologies, tools, practices and processes.

A recent article in The Hindu IT firms upskills staff in new technology where our COO Sarita Digumarti has been quoted, discusses just how major IT services companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro among others have initiated various programs to upskill their workforce. Increasingly the projects they work on necessitate having skills in new technologies such as artificial intelligence, digital, and automation.

This drive to reskill is even more relevant to IT middle managers who want to grow into more senior roles. Today leadership has a whole new definition. It is no longer about ‘being in charge’. Rather, a successful leader is one who is able to set and communicate a persuasive vision, and who concurrently, is able to motivate the team to achieve it.  

This modern leader is innovative and creative and has an interdisciplinary mix of skills that include IT, Business, and Digital technologies. They have a comprehensive knowledge of analytic tools and techniques and they know the value of data-backed decisions.

It is estimated that about 30,000 – 40,000 professionals every year learn analytical skills in India and a vast percentage of them are from IT. Many of these are upskilling and getting data savvy, so as to be able to grow within their organizations, but many more are doing so because they want to make a complete career switch to analytics.

Here at Jigsaw Academy, a big majority of our students come from an IT background and we see firsthand just how aware they are of the immense scope for those with data skills, and just how eager they are to switch careers and become data analysts.

When IT professionals come to us for advice on making that career switch, we give them the facts; that indeed there is a huge demand for skilled data talent, and that as an IT person their business acumen, programming expertise, and communication skills will already give them an edge. In order to succeed and reinvent themselves, all they need to do is pick up some practical knowledge of popular analytics tools and techniques, their application and best practices and get some experience with data sets.

The bottom line really is this… As an IT professional, you need to re-boot and upskill. Even if you want to keep coding, you still have to add to your skillset, stay relevant and in tune with what the industry is demanding and can start learning data mining. And if you decide to stop coding and make a complete career switch to Analytics or Big Data, you are making a smart move.

Because the future my friends, belongs to the data-savvy, those unicorns that sort, clean, wrangle, analyze and weave stories out of data. Are you ready for that challenge? Then stop coding! Find out how to use your intrinsic skills to find innovative and creative data-backed solutions to business problems. Become a Data Analyst, Data Scientist, a Data Something… and watch your career grow at a pace you never imagined.

CONCLUSION

If you are interested in making a career in the Data Science domain, our 11-month in-person Postgraduate Certificate Diploma in Data Science course can help you immensely in becoming a successful Data Science professional. 

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