BEING THE PROFESSIONAL WORKER (2)

Tech/IT Hard Skills to Get That Job

Roughly a third of July has gone by, and we’ve been having fun our way, how about you? We started off last week with a detailed introduction to meeting the criteria for getting employed by possessing the requisite skills, and we talked about hard skills and soft skills, by way of an overview. Today, we would look at some of the tech hard skills that give every applicant an edge when applying for a job, whether you are in tech or not.

These skills are required to a certain degree of proficiency, and you don’t need a doctorate degree in them to impress whoever goes through your CV to show that you are a progressive thinker and are better equipped to handle tasks at work. Some of the skills are better suited for certain industries than others, while the rest can be skilfully applied in every industry.

So, let’s look at a number of them, and see if we can motivate you to pick up the challenge and learn one or two of them, or maybe even more.

1. Data Mining

Data mining is the process of sorting through large data sets to identify patterns and relationships that can help solve business problems through data analysis. Data mining techniques and tools enable enterprises to predict future trends and make more-informed business decisions.

Data mining has become increasingly important to businesses across various sectors as the increase in business data available can cause data contamination and increase compliance risk.

Types of Data Mining

a. Predictive Data Mining Analysis

b. Descriptive Data Mining Analysis

The four general phases of data mining are:

i. data acquisition;

ii. data cleaning, preparation, and transformation;

iii. data analysis, modeling, classification, and forecasting; and

iv. reports.

Some of the software used by data miners are: Orange Data Mining, SAS Data Mining, DataMelt Data Mining, and MonkeyLearn. Data mining can be applied in various sectors, including: marketing, retail, banking and medicine, among others.

2. Network Security

According to Wikipedia, network security consists of the policies, processes and practices adopted to prevent, detect and monitor unauthorized access, misuse, modification, or denial of a computer network and network-accessible resources.

It is the primary job of a network security personnel to prevent the breach of the company's network by intruders. Some of the software used in network security are: Firemon, Qualys, and BitDefender

3. Database Management

Database management is the ability to make use of a database management system or DBMS. A database management system (DBMS) is system software for creating and managing databases. A DBMS makes it possible for end users to create, protect, read, update and delete data in a database.

Popular tools used in database management include MySQL, Microsoft Access, SQLite

4. User Interface Design

User interface (UI) design is the process designers use to build interfaces in software or computerized devices, focusing on looks or style. A UI designer is responsible for constructing the interface with which the user interacts with the software or website he wants to access. Poor UI would reduce the chances of patronage and therefore, behind every successful app or website, you can be sure there is a brilliant UI designer.

There are three formats user interfaces come in. They are:

a. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs)

Users interact with visual representations on digital control panels. Your phone screen or computer desktop is a GUI.

b. Voice-controlled interfaces (VUIs)

Users interact with these through their voices. Most smart assistants—e.g., Siri on iPhone and Alexa on Amazon devices—are VUIs.

c. Gesture-based interfaces

Users engage with 3D design spaces through bodily motions: e.g., in virtual reality (VR) games.

The best place for a newbie in UI to start is with GUI and a perfect tool that students can even learn with for free is Figma.

5. Statistical Analysis

Statistical analysis is the collection and interpretation of data in order to uncover patterns and trends. It is a component of data analytics. It can be used in situations like gathering research interpretations, statistical modeling or designing surveys and studies. Statistical analysis is generally used by scientists and scientists across various fields, and is used for calculations from standard deviation, to probability and much more.

Commonly used tools are: SPSS (IBM), R (R Foundation for Statistical Computing), MATLAB (The Mathworks), and Microsoft Excel

6. SEO Marketing

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It deals with the proper construction and set up of content for a web page so that it receives a high ranking on search engines and is primed to feature at the top of their search results when users search for them.

It is an integral part of web activity that has cut across conventional web use and has crawled into apps and social media.

A proper knowledge of SEO requires you to be familiar with key words, meta tags, alt text and proper use of links. It is one skill that would be helpful to anyone who wishes to place anything on the internet in the hope that that item would be accessible to the public.

Common tools that SEO experts work with are: Moz, SEMrush, SEOptimise, and Google Keyword Planner.

If you made it here, you've read all we have for you today. Be sure to check back next week as we go into soft skills.

Stay smart!