New digital technologies could bring over $150 billion (Rs 10.7 lakh crore) to India’s Gross Domestic Product by 2021. So, many Indian professionals are choosing to learn new skills in order to cash in on this economic transformation.
A December 17 study by online certification provider Simplilearn surveyed around 1,000 individuals who chose to acquire additional technical expertise, in order to learn their primary motivations for upskilling.
The prospect of an increased salary topped the list, followed by a desire for rewards and recognition.
Another question examined what domains Indians were upskilling in. The largest chunk opted for data and analytics.
Simplilearn also collected and analysed data from job portals such as LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, and Naukri, to look at some of the key professions that Indians are upskilling towards. It found five that promise to be extra hot during the digital transformation: data scientist, AI engineer, cloud architect, cybersecurity professional, and a digital project manager.
The estimated median salaries in these various professions, culled from the job portal data, are as follows.
The job portal data also gave Simplilearn a sense of how many such jobs were available in the respective fields as of 2018. Interestingly, there were far more openings for cybersecurity experts than for any other category.
One surprise was that Delhi was the city with the largest share of AI engineer jobs in 2018, at almost 30% of the country’s total. Tech hubs Bengaluru and Hyderabad lagged substantially behind the national capital.
This article first appeared on Quartz.