Joining IT sector in 2020? These are the skills you will need to excel

The NITI Aayog, in a report, has listed IT sector fields that will face huge shortage of professionals in the next few years

In the constantly changing world of Information Technology (IT), there are new advances almost every month. And in such a scenario, it becomes really important for professionals in this field to keep upgrading their skill set. Even for the ones currently studying in this field, it's necessary that they arm themselves with skill set likely to be in demand in the future.

As per a recent report, data analytics professionals will be in great demand by 2020. The study says India will face a demand-supply gap of 200,000 data analytics professionals by 2020.

Other fields in the IT sector that are likely to face huge shortage of skills in coming years include big data, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.

The NITI Aayog report titled 'National Strategy for AI', released last week, also noted that there will be huge opportunities in areas of data annotation, speech transcription and image classification among others. 

At a time when various reports have suggested that most engineering graduates in India are unemployable, the study is significant for both academic institutions and students studying in them. Several experts, over the years, have suggested that colleges need to train students according to industry requirements to produce more employable and skill-ready graduates.

In its report, the NITI Aayog also recommended ways to prepare the workforce for upcoming disruptions in the IT sector. The study said there was a need for higher industry-academia collaboration to promote learning.

“Often criticized for being overly knowledge-intensive, Indian education is in urgent need of transition particularly in subjects relevant to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math), or computer-based education. As technology-based jobs become prominent, so will the need to develop applied skills,” noted the report.

It should be noted that the Indian IT sector had witnessed worst cases of mass layoffs in 2017, mostly due to automation and changing skill set requirements.