Develop your data analytics and AI skills

The United Nations General Assembly created the World Youth Skills Day in 2014. Taking place every year on 15 July, it celebrates “the strategic importance of equipping young people with skills for employment, decent work and entrepreneurship”.

In light of this, we decided to dedicate this article to the opportunities in data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) available for young people today.

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Data analytics

There is increasing investment from companies in data analytics as the market is expected to reach US$346 bn by 2030 with a compound annual growth rate of 30.7 percent. It is also in the top three solutions that the PEX Network community is currently using or investing in as showed in our PEX Report 2022 across industries that include financial services, oil and gas, pharma, retail and manufacturing.

This growing investment creates a lot of job opportunities. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the employment of data scientists, of which data analysis is a subset, to grow 31 percent through this decade. Online course provider Coursera’s Industry Skills Report 2021 notes that there will be 149 million new digital jobs by 2025, 20 million of which are in data analysis, machine learning and AI.

Related: Why data literacy is critical for process mining

Artificial intelligence

AI was fourth on the list of solutions respondents of PEX Report 2022 were investing in and exclusive initial results of this year’s survey place it in the top three. The global market for AI was valued at US$65bn in 2020 and is expected to reach US$1.6tn by 2030. This shows a continued focus for companies to leverage the technology, with Gartner noting that 37 percent of organizations have implemented AI in some form.

AI’s value for businesses has been highlighted on PEX Network previously, especially for understanding customer behavior through customer-facing processes and powering chatbots with the technology. Servion Global Solutions expects 95 percent of customer interaction driven by AI in 2025.

As investment in these technologies increases for businesses to fuel their process improvement initiatives and customer delivery, this is providing a lot of job opportunities for young people to develop skills in data analytics and AI and start their career in the process space.

What other process-related skills do you see as critical for young people to develop today? Let us know by leaving a comment below.