Top Tech Skills You Can Learn During Quarantine

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This is a great opportunity for students, especially as some head into slower summer months soon. This is also a good opportunity for those who may have been occupationally displaced due to the pandemic.

Practicing social distancing means spending all of your time at home, but this doesn’t have to be an excuse for you to be unproductive. Turn that frown upside down by making a positive experience out of these troubling times. We suggest you take charge of the situation and use it to pick up a few new skills that could help boost your career opportunities.

It goes without saying that the tech market is a continuously growing industry that is constantly looking for qualified employees. So why not use all these free hours to learn tech-related skills?

Online coding bootcamps, for instance, take between 3 to 12 weeks to complete, so we can say that you managed to go through all courses during the quarantine period. In this guide, we’ll show you some of the best tech skills to learn and how you can do so.

Data Science

Data science is one of the fastest-growing fields in the tech industry and today most companies rely on data scientists to make smart business decisions. So why not try learning about data science and expand your career opportunities? Let us demonstrate how data science really works under the hood.

A data scientist is able to analyze a business problem based on the company’s databases and come up with ideas to approach this challenge and predict possible scenarios. This is also made possible through a process called data acquisition, where a data scientist gathers and scrapes information from different sources such as web services, online repositories, and databases.

Once this step is completed, the scientist prepares or cleans the data to make it more easily understandable. Then he or she will analyze the results and communicate them to the company’s team via a process called data visualization. 

All these steps are helpful for a company to identify potential errors and to come up with an effective business decision. Companies all over the world leverage from having a data analyst or data scientist to optimize their performance. Healthcare and pharmaceutical companies are using data science to have a better understanding of genetic reactions. This helps them to have discoveries that could change the quality of life of many people in the world. 

Data science opens up the possibilities of various roles such as data analysts, machine learning engineers, data engineers, and deep data engineers. At this point you may be wondering, how much does a data scientist earn? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a data scientist can earn from $95,000 to $185,000 a year. This positions it as one of the highest-paying jobs in the tech industry.

If you’re wondering where you can learn these skills, there are several data science bootcamps that will accelerate your career in the field. Flatiron School is one of the most popular ones. It offers a 15 weeks bootcamp where you’ll learn all the skills needed to stay ahead in the data science field. 

Software Engineering

Software engineering is everything involved in the conception of the desired software. A software engineer is someone who writes and tracks the performance of code, besides other multiple tasks involved in the development process. To create software products, developers do research, make prototypes, design and modify existing code, so this is a profession that covers a lot of ground in the tech industry.  Most of today’s companies require the help of software developers for their commercial products.

Did you know that 70% of the time you spend on your phone is spent on apps? This illustrates the importance for companies to have their own well-integrated software. Having such software allows them to take their operations to the next level in terms of customer loyalty. So we can say that learning this new skill will open up the possibility to work in almost any type of company. Besides, this profession also has one of the highest tech salaries. A software engineer can earn from $105,000 to $120,000 a year.

Where can you learn this tech skill? Thinkful has a 7-month bootcamp where you can learn all skills needed to work in a software developer position. Thinkful is currently using a remote model due to the current situation, so you can easily take advantage of this while exercising movement control.

Mobile Development

Everybody uses mobile apps. When you’re on your phone, you spend most of the time on your preferred apps. Having a mobile app is very lucrative for companies since they can improve customer loyalty. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the field of mobile development is expected to grow 21%. Since this is a very in-demand skill we could easily assume that it has a good salary (and it does)—an iOS developer can make up to $155,000 a year. 

What is mobile development all about? It is the process of creating mobile apps for devices powered by iOS. iOS developers work with two coding languages which are Objective-C or Swift. Objective-C was the first language people used to mobile programming, but it was very hard to use at first, so Apple came up with an easier and more intuitive language called Swift. While the latter now ranks higher in popularity, it’s still good to know and understand Objective-C. 

But how do you become a mobile developer in quarantine? Lambda School offers one of the most complete iOS development bootcamps, and you’ll have the option to either pay upfront or pay the entire course after you’re hired. 

Web Development

Web development is not only an in-demand skill in the tech industry, but it is also a crucial position in every company. If your company doesn’t establish a social presence,  your brand might never occupy a space in your customers’ minds. So every company, organization or institution must have a well organized and attractive website where visitors can come to look at their products or services. That’s why it is so important for them to have a highly-skilled web developer.

Web development is the process of creating, designing and maintaining a website. A website developer works with programming code to ensure the website’s functionality based on the client’s requirements. 

This process includes writing markups and coding. Web developers can specialize in two areas—front end and back end development. Front end developers deal with all the process of designing the visual aspects of the website, while back end developers work with servers integration. Both of them are equally important for the optimum performance of a website. Some of the most common programming languages for web development are CSS, HTML, and Java.

Where can you learn this skill? General Assembly is one of the leading institutions in terms of web development, and they’re currently working completely remotely to ensure the students’ safety due to the current situation. General Assembly also offers a top-notch specialization in front end development, for those of you who already have some web development knowledge and enjoy working with front end development. 

Conclusion

Don’t let this stay-at-home period stop you from improving yourself. These are some of the skills you can learn from the comfort of your own home. The goal is to invest all your time into something that will help you take your career to the next level. Most of these schools we suggested offer remote lessons. Grab this chance to upskill and use it later to build a profitable and successful career.