In the year 2017, there were many ups and downs for the IT sector. But 2018 is considered to be the better year for this Information Technology sector. It looks like there is a rise in the total number of opportunities for the people who deserved them as these talented people have exactly the right set of skills required by the emerging technology domains such as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Due to the revival mode of the Indian job market related to the IT job, the techies and job seekers who have the right skills will surely be in the excellent position to encash the trend of 2018.

Let’s focus on some of the essential skills that must be acquired by the IT professionals in the year 2018 to capitalize the available opportunities.

1. Machine Learning

The name itself is suggesting about what machine learning is? It is simply a perfect combination of two attributes in which there is a blending of human intelligence with the computer systems. In fact, either you have listened about this or you have seen it, face recognition which is popularly available in smartphones nowadays. Furthermore, face recognition is also found on Facebook and laptops. Therefore, demand for skilled and talented machine learning professionals are expected to be in demand in many different sectors like e-commerce, finance and healthcare ones.

2. Cloud Computing

It is a business model in which service provider will take care of the software requirements along with the infrastructure of the clients totally in the customized environment. There is no doubt that in the coming time, there will be a significant rise in the evolution of cloud services, cloud computing, and related solutions. Cloud computing will see a hike in the future which will be surely accompanied by crowdsourced storage and hybrid cloud solutions.

3. Big Data

In 2018, it is expected that nearly 50 % of all enterprises will be ready to embrace a public-cloud-first policy for analytics, data and big data. In fact, industry experts believed that there will be a great change in the coming future as the emphasis will be laid on what type data should be ignored instead of giving emphasis on which data should be used. Data quality will be more important than anything else. This change in IT will surely give a hike in the demand for the data engineers in the market.  If you look for some data, you will find that there are less than 1% data scientists and around 13 % jobs related to data are positioned by the data engineers.

4. DevOps

This year 2018 is expected to be the boon for DevOps as there are big chances that DevOps will go mainstream. Containers are very important for enabling this technology of DevOps. Therefore, in 2018, you may find some growth in the deployments of the container and it is expected that the demand will accelerate. So, there are chances that one may see the spike in the demand for Portal DevOps Specialists, Automation DevOps Engineers, DevOps Engineers, and Deployment Engineers.

5. Artificial Intelligence

In 2018, there will be a change in the trend, the enterprise will use the Artificial Intelligence to make important decisions. AI will be really very helpful in offering customized solutions to the clients and providing instructions to the employees for what to do in the real time. There were complex procedures in the older text analytics. Thus, there were not many of the companies who hold the success in analyzing the data. But, now with the deep understanding and learning of AI, it has become possible to analyze the structures as well as unstructured text data successfully.

6. Data Analytics

With the rise in the large data sets for processing, the demands for systems for operating these kinds of algorithms along with the machine learning one have been increased. In the IT sector,  data analytics is considered as the lifeline. Technologies, as well as techniques such as Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Data Science and Big Data, are used largely for analyzing the vast amount of data at a very fast rate.

Therefore, if you want to be a successful data scientists and want to refine all the data analytics strategies, then it is essential to have deep insights of system performance along with the customer behavior.

7. UI/UX

UX and UI are going to be somewhat typical in 2018 as they are ready to push all the boundaries in 2018 and get ready to break the rules and taking risks as AR (Augmented Reality). Virtual Reality will make its place and play a significant role in the designs of UX and UI. All these things will give a hike in the demands for skilled UI/UX developers, designers, user researchers, architects and usability analysts in the country.

8. Full stack development

This occupation is gaining popularity. In 2017, there was a survey by the stack overflow in which it was said that about 75.2% full stack developers have an interest in getting new opportunities. In this year 2018, there will be a lot of opportunities for full stack software, full stack web application engineers, full stack developers, full-stack engineers, and many other roles.

9. Blockchain

It is estimated that by the year 2020, the usage of blockchain based cryptocurrencies will derive the business value around the $1 billion for the banking industry. It was stated in the Gartner report. This increased value will add more scope to many jobs such as Blockchain Architect, Blockchain Consultant, Blockchain Developer and so on. Presently, $155 billion is the combined valued of the cryptocurrencies. By the end of the year 2023, it is estimated that there will be a substantial rise in this value.

10. IoT

IoT is surely the most important part of the customer value in the coming future. There has been increased in the usage of intelligent agents such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. This change in trend has given the marketers insights to develop new tools for getting knowledge about the customer behavior. Therefore, there will be a growth in the market of the Internet of Things. It will increase the number of jobs in the country.