As technology transforms industries, new sets of skills are showing their worth, offering career growth and opportunities.
It will come as a surprise to exactly no one that many of the skills required to succeed in business today hadn’t even been thought of ten years ago. While that might seem intimidating at first glance, it also creates a world of opportunities for those willing to up their skills and hit the ground running.
“Digital and data skills dominate the fastest growing emerging skills [in Australia] and can act as gateway for transitions between jobs,” reports the Australian Government’s National Skills Commission.
And Deloitte reports in its Australia’s Digital Pulse that, while there is a lot of growth in technology and a strong demand in Australia for technology workers, the sector is facing a serious lack of supply.
“There were 64,700 more workers in the technology workforce [in 2021] than in 2020, with the total reaching 870,300, the highest on record,” it reports, adding that the figure represents an 8 per cent increase year on year, the second highest growth in the technology workforce since their reporting began.
“The strong overall growth in Australian technology workers is expected to continue. By 2024, Australia’s Digital Pulse forecasts that there will be over 1 million technology workers in Australia, growing to 1.2 million by 2027. Achieving this growth requires encouraging workers to join the technology workforce, as well as retaining existing workers.”
Take a look at any employment site and you’ll see that demand reflected in a growing range of jobs available that you probably didn’t dream of becoming when you were a child because they didn’t exist, such as:
- data scientist
- business intelligence developer
- digital finance specialist
- marketing growth analyst
- social media manager.
And jobs that have been around for a long time have evolved to incorporate digital skills as an integral part of their daily tasks, such as:
- marketing adviser
- business analyst
- finance specialist
- human resources adviser
- project manager.
These are just a sample of the growing list of jobs requiring digital skills. There are opportunities for those willing to learn, with the benefit of not having to compete with people who have been in the industry for decades, for the simple reason that the industry hasn’t existed for decades.
And along with technology comes an evolving approach to work, including the ability to work for anyone from home, and hybrid arrangements.
The good news is it doesn’t take a long time to learn what you need to know to incorporate digital skills into your career, or pivot and start a new one.
Deakin University’s business school is ranked in the top 1 per cent in the world (in the 2023 QS World University Rankings), and offers a range of digital skill-based graduate qualifications that can help you accelerate your career and increase your value in business, such as:
- Graduate Certificate of Artificial Intelligence for Business
- Graduate Certificate of Marketing Technology
- Graduate Certificate of Digital Finance.
The qualifications take only six months (full-time – part-time is also available), and can be delivered in person or via flexible online learning.
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Want to know more? Register here for our free online post-graduate business course webinar, where you can hear from our course leaders about how you can align your career to these emerging paths that will shape business for decades to come.