Top skills demanded by employers. Programs that deliver these skills

McKinsey confirmed in a 2021 report that 25% more workers need to switch jobs than before the pandemic; thanks to the accelerated trends in remote work, automation, and e-commerce. 

However, employers today look out for a wide array of technical and critical soft skills. Bernard Marr confirmed the same in his book Future Skills: The 20 Skills and Competencies Everyone Needs to Succeed in a Digital World.  

However, you’re a student who’s already burdened with a humongous syllabus, assignments, and personal life. Thus, we came to your rescue.

In the next five minutes, we’ll share the 5 in-demand skills employers want.   

Meanwhile, if you need assistance in finding an university, here’s how GradRight can help:

Note: the information is true at the time of writing. That’s September 2022.

5 top in-demand skills employers want

1. Analytics

Check out these three interesting facts:

• Online users generate up to 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.
• Experts believe the world will generate up to 181 zettabytes of data by 2025.
• 95% of businesses confirmed not being able to manage unstructured data affects their lead generation, revenue, and customer retention. 

Analytics stands for the process of spotting, analysing, and interpreting data patterns. Businesses use the data to offer a personalised experience to their customers; thereby generating higher revenues and getting better customer retention.  

That’s why Analytics has become one of the top skills in demand in 2022. These three sections dominate the Analytics market:

• Business Analytics
• Data Analytics
• Marketing Analytics

Top 10 universities teaching Analytics

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. The University of Texas at Austin
3. Imperial College London
4. UCLA Anderson School of Management
5. University of Edinburgh Business School
6. Warwick Business School
7. USC Marshall School of Business
8. Alliance Manchester Business School
9. Austin McCombs School of Business
10. University College Dublin

How to select a university? Here’s how:

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The importance of artificial intelligence through the eyes of data:

• 86% of CEOs treat artificial intelligence as a mainstream technology in business as of 2021.
• Gartner confirmed companies that use artificial intelligence will grow customer satisfaction by 25% by 2023. 
• The artificial intelligence market share is going to be valued at up to $190.61 billion in the U.S. by 2025.   

The above-mentioned information should tell you why artificial intelligence is one of the high-demand skills to learn. 

Here’s how artificial intelligence helps businesses:

• Suggests personalised product or service recommendations to the customer based on past customer behaviours. The process helps generate higher revenues.
• Offers enhanced customer service experience through chatbots. The AI-powered digital assistance creates a personal experience for the users.
• Helps in creating content marketing strategies. Artificial Intelligence uses algorithms to analyse the existing data to achieve the same. 
• Offers sentiment analysis to analyse customer emotions. The process analyses customer opinions from millions of forums, web pages, and reviews. Afterwards, artificial intelligence analyses the data to gauge customer preferences, needs, and intents.     

Top 10 universities teaching Artificial Intelligence (AI)

1. Stanford University
2. University of California–Berkeley
3. Carnegie Mellon University
4. Georgia Institute of Technology
5. Harvard University
6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
8. University of Maryland College Park
9. University of Washington
10. University of Massachusetts Amherst UMass CICS

3. Machine Learning

Here are three interesting facts for you to mull over:

• Machine learning helped Netflix save $1 billion; thanks to the combined effect of content recommendations and personalisations.
• The accuracy rate of machine learning to predict the mortality of Covid-19 patients is 92%.
• The Deep Learning ML Program by Google can detect breast cancer 89% of the time.  

Thus, is it a surprise that machine learning is going to be one of the high-demand skills for the next 10 years? 

Here’s how machine learning helps businesses:

• Helps businesses with a complete understanding of a business’s risk profile such as frauds, loss prevention, and errors, among other liabilities. 
• Helps find areas in which businesses can maximize productivity. For example, machine learning spots areas in business with needless manual tasks and touchpoints. Removing these translates to that time and effort being utilised somewhere else where it’ll be beneficial. 
• Helps automate routine tasks such as data discovery, security monitoring, and auditing.
• Helps predict the churn rate. Machine learning predicts not only which customers are likely to churn in the near future but also showcases the most essential factors leading to the churn.
• Helps improve personalisation.     

Top 10 universities teaching Machine Learning

1. Cambridge University
2. Oxford University
3. University College London
4. Carnegie Mellon University
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
6. John Hopkins University
7. University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
8. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
9. California Institute of Technology
10. University of Michigan Ann Arbor

4. Management and Leadership

Three alarming facts:

• 79% of employees quit their jobs because their bosses don’t appreciate them enough.
• 83% of businesses believe a company must have leaders at all levels in the organisation.
• 5% of companies have integrated leadership development.

The stats prove management and leadership is one of the high-demand but low-supply skills. 

Here’s how management and leadership skills help businesses:

• Efficient managers are skilled in planning, organising, and coordinating. They’re the best choice whenever the company has to undertake a complex project.
• Efficient leaders know how to influence, inspire, and innovate. Whenever the company needs new ideas or directions or employee morale is down, leaders are the best bet to save the scenario. 
• Efficient managers and leaders are quick to recognise both their and their employee’s strengths, weaknesses, and emotions. They can control their emotions during high-stress moments.
• Efficient managers and leaders are well-adapted to communicate what they want from their employees. Furthermore, they’re great at listening to their employee’s needs.

Top 10 universities teaching Management and Leadership

1. University of San Diego 
2. Angelo State University 
3. Texas A&M University 
4. Pennsylvania State University 
5. Florida State University 
6. University of Houston
7. London Business School
8. Harvard Business School
9. University of California, Berkeley (UCB)
10. Yale University

5. Business Strategy

Check out the importance of business strategy through the lens of data:

• 68% of companies confirm they’re good at developing strategies. The number was 80% in 2012.
• 49% of companies confirm their leaders spend only a day each month reviewing the business strategy.
• 95% of employees never understand their company’s strategy. 

This gap has made business strategy one of the most in-demand skills in 2022.

Here’s how business strategy helps businesses:

• Helps develop a direction for the business to work towards. 
• Helps not fall into the trap of competitive convergence. If you don’t know, competitive convergence is when companies follow their competitor’s best practices and end up copying them. A clear business strategy helps businesses stand out from the crowd.
• Helps measure success as now they have a parameter to measure it against.  

Top 10 universities teaching Business Strategy

1. London Business School
2. Harvard University
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
4. University of Cambridge
5. Stanford University
6. University of Oxford
7. University of Pennsylvania
8. The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
9. University of California, Berkeley (UCB)
10. Northwestern University

Here’s a checklist for the documents you’ll need to study abroad.

Top in-demand skills employers want – stay updated to have better chances at hiring

A skilled candidate has a better chance of getting hired than an unskilled employee. Thus, staying on top of the in-demand skills will keep you ahead of the competition. 

Now that you know the 5 top in-demand skills employers want, we hope the knowledge will help you make the most out of upskilling and help you to get hired.