Coursera’s Global Industry Skills Report of 2021 has been released, and it contains some excellent insights into the skills of tomorrow. You can download it for yourself here.
It’s been clear for some time that a digital transformation is underway, and that the skills to succeed in tomorrow’s will be vastly different than those of today. I’ve personally had the mission to grow the number of AI-savvy people to help bootstrap that transformation, but I’m amazed by how accelerated the growth has been.
If you take nothing else from the report, take this:
Digital jobs in 2020 were around 41M. By 2025, just 4 years from now, they’ll be at 190M.
The growth is almost 3.5x over 5 years, which is unprecedented! Not only that, it predicts that of those 149M new jobs, 98 Million will be in Software Development and a further 20 Million will be in Data Analysis, Machine Learning and AI.
Much of this comes from research into digital transformation that was conducted by Microsoft showing that two years worth of transformation was concentrated into 2 months because of lockdown.
In short – the digital and AI future is arriving early.
When exploring the report, you’ll see, across the board that every sector is projecting massive increases in Software Development roles in particular, leading to the 98M total new jobs.
So, there’s never been a better time to get into Software Development, or to refresh your current skills if you are a developer.
The top desired skills vary by dimain, but many of them have free tutorials on Coursera and elsewhere. Some I’d like to call out are:
- JavaScript which you can learn at w3schools
- Web Development with University of Michigan at Coursera
- Python for Everybody with University of Michigan at Coursera
- Machine Learning with Stanford at Coursera
- Applied Machine Learning with TensorFlow at Coursera
- Deep Learning with Deeplearning.ai at Coursera