Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of talk about “soft skills” that employees need to learn, such as time management, emotional intelligence, and effective communication. But what “hard skills” or technical skills will your employees need to learn in 2018 to keep up in a world full of ever-changing technology?
Below are the top five (out of 25) hard skills your company will need in 2018, according to data compiled from 500+ million LinkedIn® members and recruiters.
1. Cloud and Distributed Computing
Most (if not all) of your technology platforms and applications will be hosted in the cloud within the next few years, if they aren’t already. And this applies to platforms and applications that your internal teams use and those that your customers and partners use. Your staff should be able to easily build, manage, maintain, distribute, and teach others how to use these platforms and applications as they evolve over time. You may need to hire or train different platform engineers or cloud architects or get some staff members certified in Amazon.com® Web Services and who know how to use Microsoft® Azure.
2. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining
With the growth of big data, your organization will need to hire and/or train individuals to dig through vast quantities of data and make sense of them throughout every department of your organization. They’ll need to be adept at finding patterns and disparities in data and using data mining and analysis tools for large data sets from various data sources so they can analyze them for your business. You’ll need to train and/or hire business analysts, data analysts, and statisticians in some cases. And you may want individuals who understand R programming language.
3. Middleware and Integration Software
With the popularity of cloud services and platforms, application programming interfaces (APIs) integrations and middleware are becoming more popular, too. More and more cloud platforms and systems need to be linked and integrated to ensure data and information run smoothly on the back end and front end. Plan to hire and/or train an IT manager or a systems integration engineer. And ensure someone on your staff is well-versed in JavaScript, JSON, and or ASP.NET.
4. Web Architecture and Development Framework
You’ll want to ensure you have staff members who are adept at building the technical components of a website as it’s being designed, developed, revamped, and deployed. At the very least, they should know how to build angular and node apps. And you’ll want them to understand the basics of Angular JavaScript. Plan to hire and/or train Web developers and full-stack Web developers.
5. User Interface Design
Above all else, you’ll want to ensure the interface on all your platforms and applications is easy for users to access and navigate. Otherwise, they won’t use your applications and platforms. For instance, you’ll want to make mobile apps easy to access and use and place features on dashboards in data analytics tools in intuitive locations. Investing in individuals who have UX design expertise will be extremely important in 2018.
Don’t lag behind the competition in 2018. Make sure your organization’s employees learn the above hard skills.