As the demand for IT professionals often outpaces the recruitment capacity, the employment market of IT outsourcing is booming. Businesses are eager to hire dedicated teams for various IT services as it allows them to get the best specialists from a wide range of expert fields. Apart from the essential roles of web or mobile developers, Itransition, as a software development company, often looks for more specific roles to add to the running projects, such as those connected with the cloud, microservices, data, and security.
To provide insights into what customers expect to find on the IT outsourcing talent market right now, we’ve compiled a list of professionals of growing importance and popularity, along with the skills they need to have.
Cloud developers and consultants
Cloud is nothing new but as more and more businesses across all industries want to move their data and processes to the cloud, there’s the need to continuously expand teams of cloud developers. The roles usually include designing a cloud computing and migration strategy, and developing, deploying, and managing cloud infrastructures and apps.
Such professionals are expected to:
- Have strong expertise in public and private cloud deployment.
- Have experience in working with multiple cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure Solution Architect, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.
- Have experience in implementing, customizing, and scaling cloud-based platforms, such as Salesforce, SAP Commerce Cloud, Atlassian, and more.
- Have experience with IT service management, security, governance, automation, etc.
Data scientists
Businesses have realized that they sit on a treasure trove of data and can boost their performance and customer-centricity by making use of this data. For this reason, companies crave finding brilliant data scientists who will aggregate, clean, process, and analyze data and, finally, deliver those insights that will let managers make informed decisions and accurate predictions.
The corresponding skills needed are:
- Strong knowledge of data mining and machine learning algorithms.
- Expertise in smart automation.
- Ability to create analytical data models and complex data ecosystems.
- Knowledge of data science programming languages (Python, R, Java, JavaScript, Scala, SQL, etc.).
- Proficiency in data science tools and frameworks (Tableau, Apache Hadoop, TensorFlow, etc.).
- Business-focused problem solving driven by identified trends and patterns.
Machine learning engineers
Machine learning (ML) engineers usually work in close cooperation with data scientists and are needed across a number of critical industries, from healthcare to space programs. They build complex algorithms, feed them with large datasets, and train these algorithms to learn and act intelligently on their own, like a human would. ML engineers can use other subsets of AI, such as natural language processing or voice and image recognition.
The most common requirements for ML specialists are:
- Analysis of existing data, systems, and algorithms.
- Transformation of data science prototypes and models.
- Proficiency in programming languages (Python, R, Java, C++), ML frameworks (TensorFlow and Keras), big data frameworks (Hadoop, Spark, Hive), ML libraries.
- Creation of new machine learning and deep learning models (supervised and unsupervised) from scratch.
- Testing and deployment of ML models.
- Development of ML apps and features.
DevOps engineers
The role of DevOps engineer has become indispensable for many companies that want their software to be innovative and stable at the same time. DevOps professionals collaborate across teams throughout the development life cycle, help improve IT systems and increase productivity by using automation, and are the ones who react to all things unexpected. They speed up software development using the CI/CD approach (with shorter and more controllable iterations) and enable real-time monitoring and maintenance of the software infrastructure.
DevOps engineers are expected to have:
- Skills in software engineering and release orchestration.
- Strong understanding of major DevOps tools related to source control, configuration management, containers, orchestration, continuous integration, deployment automation.
- Knowledge of best DevOps practices, like CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, Agile engineering.
- Cloud-related skills.
- Coding and scripting skills and familiarity with multiple programming languages (Python, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, etc.).
- Good command of automation technologies and tools.
- Software security skills.
- Soft skills.
IT security specialists
Mass digitization, migration to the cloud, and distributed teams raise many concerns in terms of security. The common sentiment of most CEOs, CTOs and business leaders is to keep their data and systems safe from potential cyber threats, both internal and external. Another concern is compliance with state regulations and laws, particularly when working across the globe. For this reason, companies require specialists who can manage authorization levels, audit systems, spot security vulnerabilities, prevent hacking attacks, and make sure operations are law-abiding.
Companies search for security specialists with the following skills and experience:
- Impeccable knowledge of the industry laws and regulations.
- Background in designing and implementing security policies and procedures.
- Experience of running security audits, document management, and reporting.
- Good command of security systems and tools.
- Understanding of programming and script writing for participating in security system development.
In a nutshell
As businesses actively harness the cloud and adapt to working in the new normal, they require new specialists who can develop and release cloud-based software faster, automate processes, turn data into value, and provide first-class security.
It’s not always possible to timely recruit or develop talents in-house so many companies prefer to source necessary specialists from software engineering services providers. This way, they can find professionals who’ve already completed a number of projects in the same industry so they can offer expertise that matches the requirements.