Top engineering skills to be in demand for next couple of years.

Technologies keep on changing rapidly and it is really important for engineers to continuously evolve their skill-set if they want to get jobs and command premium salaries. As a student, you need to ensure to be updated and posses the minimum skills required to survive in competitive job market. Here are the top such skills which are set to be high in demand for a long period ahead:

Statistical Analysis – With data getting generated at unprecedented pace, organizations need people who are able to crunch data and give insights which can help in better decision making.

Artificial Intelligence – Hottest technology in market right now is AI. Though AI is still not very mature but several startups have come up which have started building solution on AI. From startups to Fortune 500 companies, AI is something which has caught the fancy of most of them and there is immense lack of resources in the market.

Python language – A continuation of the above, most of the machine learning algorithms is being written using Python language. Resources with such skill set will be in huge demand in 2017.

Natural Language Processing – Most of the companies, across verticals, are moving towards automation. This automation can help in reducing manual work which is now being done by Machines, thus reducing cost and making work much faster. NLP combined with machine learning is one of the hot sectors. There could be plethora of use cases of the same, artificial chat engines being one of them.

Big Data Expertise – Slowly adoption and usage of big data is becoming mainstream and more and more companies have started using big data databases. Still there is need of resources that are extremely proficient in using big data, doing analysis on it.

User Interface design – Gone are the days when people used to only look at the functionality of the product and buy it. Now the user interface as well as seamless experience is also equally important, if not more, than the functionality. People with excellent sense of user interface are in great demand.

Tech professionals who can customize off-the-shelf applications, work on APIs and integration points, and even develop agile software. Besides this she lists some other crucial skills engineers must possess:

Best coding standards – A good engineer must bring top order coding standards, policies and procedures in the company. They should have broad knowledge about different hardware and software systems and their compatibility levels.

Knowledge of cloud – The cloud environment is growing very fast thus creating many new opportunities for the businesses. Therefore there will be more opportunities in cloud technologies, supporting integration and engineering the architecture needed for a cloud environment. Cloud architects, software engineers with cloud or AWS [Amazon Web Services] experience, DevOps engineers will be in demand.

Business intelligence analytics – To understand buying patterns and industry trends and ultimately drive business strategy the candidate should have fair knowledge of these skills. To understand user requirement and behavior pattern (because organizations will need help making sense of all of the data generated by technological disruptions) they should understand this technology.

Database management – Proficiency in data modeling and database design, as does the ability to ensure database performance and data integrity and security is required. If it’s not built in from the start, security is much more difficult to incorporate effectively.