Techies reskill to log on to big data deluge

BENGALURU: Skills in data visualisation, data science and machine learning are among the most valued for technology recruiters today. This is because of the humongous amount of digital data being generated nowadays - companies' need to glean insights from them, present them in ways that are easily understandable, and also make predictions.

This is being reflected in the number of working professionals signing up for specialised courses in these spaces. Candidates, who complete the courses, tend to get between 20 per cent and 50 per cent increase in salaries. Kashyap Dalal, chief business officer at online learning platform Simplilearn, says big data and analytics courses were the big growth drivers in the past three years.

While data science continues to remain popular, accounting for 30 per cent of all learners, courses on visualisation tools and machine learning have become very attractive over the past six months, he says. Almost 25 per cent of Simplilearn's applicants have opted for machine learning.

Machine learning reduces the need for human intervention and speeds up analysis. With machine-learning algorithms easily available on the cloud, the opportunity to use them has increased dramatically. Data-visualisation solutions enable even the technologically less literate to quickly understand correlations and other insights gleaned from data. And data science allows users to go beyond analytics, to making predictions.

AcadGild, another online training course provider, has seen 300 students applying for the course on the data visualisation tool Tableau in the past nine months.

"The number was just 40 in the preceding nine months. We are seeing similar numbers for the courses on Spark," says co-founder Vikalp Jain. Apache Spark is a real-time analytics tool for big data. Tableau and Spark apart, specialised courses gaining ground include DevOps (development operations), a method of delivering IT systems faster, the Python programming language, which is needed in building machine-learning solutions, and Selenium, an automation testing tool.