The top five in-demand digital skills in India: Report

Findings from a recent research report, titled “Unlocking APAC’s Digital Potential: Changing Digital Skill Needs and Policy Approaches” have revealed some interesting statistics on the emerging digital talent needs across APAC. Prepared by strategy and economics consulting firm AlphaBeta, and commissioned by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the report analyzes the digital skills applied by workers in their jobs today and projects the digital skills required by workforces over the next five years.

According to the research, digitally skilled workers constitute 12 per cent of India’s present workforce. However, in order to keep pace with the technological advancements and consequent increases in demand for talent, the average Indian worker will have to develop seven new digital skills by 2025. Overall, the number of workers in India requiring digital skills will need to increase nine times by 2025, the research estimates, amounting to a total of 3.9 billion digital skill training from 2020 to 2025.

The top five in-demand digital skills in India are:

• Cloud architecture design 
• Software operations support 
• Website/game/software development 
• Large-scale data modelling 
• Cybersecurity skills

Rahul Sharma, President, Public Sector – AISPL, AWS India and South Asia, shared that the research highlights greater demand for digital workers even in non-technology sectors such as manufacturing and education. 

Cloud architecture design and the ability to create original digital content such as software and web applications will be among the most in-demand digital skills for the manufacturing sector by 2025, with more than 50 per cent of digital workers in the sector predicting that they will require these skills to perform their jobs.

In fact, the report suggests 76 per cent of the digital workers in India believe that by 2025, cloud computing will be a required competency for them to perform their jobs proficiently. 

Technology is no longer a topic for debate. The need of the hour is to recognize individual and business requirements, analyze where technology fits in to achieve short-term and long-term goals, and elevate the capabilities of both the organization and the workforce to thrive in the digital reality.