Ways to Improve Your Technical Skills in IT 1

The benefits of having tech skills go far beyond the information technology industry. Strong technical skills in IT are essential in today’s changing world and if you proactively and consistently enhance your IT skills, you will improve both your personal and professional life.

What are technical skills?
Technical skills are the abilities and knowledge needed to perform specific tasks. They are practical and often relate to mechanical, information technology, mathematical, or scientific tasks. Some examples include

• Knowledge of programming languages, mechanical equipment, or tools.
• Common operating systems
• Software proficiency
• Technical writing
• Project management
• Data analysis

Technical skills vary widely between industry and job type. For computer programmers, knowledge of various coding languages is considered a technical skill. Customer service representatives may need technical skills relating to customer management and telephone systems. Teachers might need technical skills related to instructional technologies and software applications ranging from student behavior monitoring to grading.

Reasons why consistently improving your technical skills is important:

Increase in confidence and productivity
Time is precious and valuable to everyone. If you want to work smarter rather than harder, constantly improving your technical skills is a no brainer. Developing these skills will allow you to feel more confident in using emerging technology and you will become faster in finishing tasks.

For example, having IT skills will allow you to save money and time as you will be able to solve a technical issue independently. No need to hire an IT expert at a high hourly rate. Not only will your confidence increase but your productivity will skyrocket when you equip yourself with technical skills – whether you learn about keyboard shortcuts, debug programs or increase traffic to your website.

You will free up your time, allowing you to focus your attention on important projects and jobs.

Prevents future tech problems and allows for more collaboration
If you understand how IT processes work, technology becomes less frustrating and reduces error. If you know a few technical skills in IT, this will enable you to maintain and upgrade your devices and software, and therefore prevent issues occurring in the future.

Upskilling will also help you to become a more effective collaborator and therefore a better leader for your team. For example, as the web grows more complex, acquiring a few coding and programming skills will become beneficial as they are becoming critical to any business. Understanding the basics of HTML and CSS, JavaScript and CMS will help you better collaborate with your web and IT team, and you will better understand your web designers and coders, and their processes and issues.

Having an understanding of other departments can help improve collaboration and communication between cross-functional teams.

More versatility and security in your industry
No matter what industry you work in, every industry and career is becoming more technology-focused and software-reliant. A 2017 annual report prepared by Deloitte Access Economics reveals that an additional 81,000 jobs are needed by 2022. Whether you like it or not, companies that leap into the tech era will have an easier time adapting to changing expectations. And these companies and people will have a competitive advantage.

Farmers have adopted technology such as GPS, mapping, and sensor technologies that have seen advantages such as better efficiency in how they work on a day-to-day basis. The implementation of GPS and mapping technologies have helped keep track of equipment and operations. Furthermore, agriculture sensors or drones have helped generate data on livestock, soil, seeds, and crops. In the education sector, grading has also become more efficient with the transition from manual grading by hand to documents now being digitized.

Regardless of your industry, acquiring IT skills will help you become a well-rounded employee, a great asset, and stand out from other competing candidates vying for the same position.

You will be able to stay relevant throughout the changes in the technology and the IT sector. Better yet, upskilling early will give you a competitive advantage when it comes to employability. And it will prove your willingness to learn and determination to go above and beyond. You will be able to not only perform better but progress into newer roles and opportunities that require the new set of skills that you have learned.