The year 2020 saw some vital and impactful changes of the decade, with countries lock-down and millions of people losing their jobs overnight. After seven months of separation, as things are now starting to return to normal, companies have begun to seek to withstand the post-COVID period. With tech experts becoming a vital resource amid this crisis, businesses have begun to use their resources to attract the best tech experts to stay influential. As a result, there has been a steady growth in demand for practitioners with specialized technological skills.
Although technological skills have often been pursued, some skills are projected to gain greater momentum than others in the post-COVID world. In reality, numerous surveys and studies at the beginning of the year have highlighted the growth in fields such as artificial intelligence, deep learning, data processing, and machine learning. Through the pandemic era, these domains have continued to evolve at a decent pace.
AI/ML Can Help in adapting to technological evolution:
To stay competitive beyond the COVID era, organizations are urgently searching for tech expertise and capabilities that can help them respond to the current transition. And that’s why artificial intelligence and machine learning turned out to be the crucial technologies that are causing a boom in the industry. Not only are innovations used widely in the market, but they also lead to substantial advancement.
With companies expected to simplify their processes and primary manual tasks, the need for AI and ML expertise has grown. LinkedIn’s jobs report for this year indicated that hiring growth for AI specialists has risen to 74% annually in the last few years. On the other hand, according to another career platform, the average basic salary of a machine learning engineer is $145,539 per year in the US and a median income of 13.6 lakhs in India.
Data indicate that, amid the economic slowdown, the market for AI and ML skills must be stable without any drop in their salaries. The study also noted that skills such as TensorFlow, Python, Natural Language Processing are in the highest demand and would thus be essential for practitioners to work on AI / ML.
Accordingly, Ammar Jagirdar, Product Head at Qure.ai, said that while the need for trained data scientists and engineers has always been high, in the post-COVID period, we understand the value of resilience. Even Lakshya Sivaramakrishnan, Google’s Program Head, agrees that machine learning and data science will be software skills that will dramatically gain momentum in the post-COVID era.
That is because more and more businesses will be searching for more adaptability and versatility after the pandemic and adjusting to the improvements expected to remain significant. However, she also claims that companies could not keep creating templates without getting engineered experts, and that is where the stack developers come into play.
No one can dispute the role of AI and ML in almost every sector, including healthcare, banking, retail, manufacturing, education, etc. When asked, Abhinav Tushar, Head of AI at Vernacular.ai, claimed that, with machine learning gaining momentum, there is a greater need for work involving automatic text, audio, and video media content processing.
With such facts in hand, it is well understood that the post-COVID future will be much advanced than it is today, with businesses embracing new technologies such as artificial intelligence and deep learning. Since AI and ML would be the new standard rather than the anomaly, businesses, as well as practitioners, need to look at their plans and find ways to get to grips with this changing technology.
