P@SHA survey reveals the seven IT skills you need to succeed in 2021

In a survey conducted by Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) assessing the modern-day training requirements of the IT industry in Pakistan, it was revealed that there are seven key IT skills that companies are interested in investing in next year. Learning about these skills is the first step in realizing the kind of future that tech companies want to build and being ready for it.

The following technologies are the ones that companies want to adopt starting next year:

• Artificial Intelligence and IoT
• Cloud Technologies (Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure)
• Quality Assurance and Automation
• MEAN/MERN Stack
• Mobile App Development
• Agile Methodologies
• Big Data and Blockchain

You might have noticed quite a lot of buzzwords here, like AI, IoT, and Blockchain. This is because these technologies are not going away anytime soon, particularly given the ample opportunities for research and innovation that they have created.

According to the survey results, 61 percent of companies do not have an internal training program, and only 39 percent have an internal program that emphasizes the training of fresh grads as well as experienced personnel for new technologies.

Moreover, 47 percent of the respondents have less than 50 employees, and 25 percent of the respondents have an employee strength between 50 to 100. Around 50 percent of the surveyed entities have both local and foreign clients.

Currently, companies are mostly working in MEAN/MERN stacks, cloud technologies such as AWS and Azure, native mobile app development, digital marketing, and other web development technologies. In the foreseeable future, around 54 percent of the companies will be focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) whereas, 46 percent will focus on Big Data and Blockchain, and 36 percent will be interested in working in Cloud Computing and MERN.

Furthermore, the survey detailed that 43 percent of the respondent companies are willing to spend up to Rs. 10,000 per head, 25 percent are willing to spend between 10-20 thousand rupees per head, 11.4 percent can disburse 20-30 thousand rupees, and interestingly, 18.2 percent are willing to expend more than 30 thousand rupees per head. However, in the last one year, 59 percent of companies did not provide their employees with any training opportunity, while 41 percent of the companies did.

Besides training of the resources, IT companies are also interested in different certifications such as ISO 27001, ISO 20000, and ISO 900.