What High-Value Tech Skills Can You Learn At Home?

For more and more professionals, upskilling naturally means learning how to use emerging digital technologies, and grow their technological skills. With digital technologies rapidly being adopted in virtually every industry across the globe, engaging with and deepening your understanding of digital technologies can help elevate your CV and ensure that you can gain a competitive edge within your sector.

Of course, learning what tech skills are worth investing in is also dependent on the trajectory you’d ideally like your career to take. So to help out, we’ll be outlining some of the most popular (and simple) tech skills that you can learn autonomously and even from home today, as well as sharing which professionals may benefit most from adding these tech skills to their repertoire.

Continue reading for ways you can meet the rising demand for tech-savvy professionals by upskilling right from the comfort of your own home office.

Graphic Design & Multimedia Skills

Many people have burgeoning artistic personality traits and are particularly good at imagining potential photos, graphics, and other visual cues. For them, it makes perfect sense to learn about the industry's top creative software suites.

And learning how to use all the world’s leading creative software suites doesn’t actually need to take 10,000 hours of mastery either. For instance, with the Adobe Express design app, you can make stunning graphic presentations come to life for an endless list of potential applications – making you extremely valuable to hiring managers in nearly all industries. And once you know your way around the free Adobe Express app, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump towards knowing your way around other Adobe software, or even other design tools altogether! After all, they all aspire to maintain intuitive interfaces, so learning one can help soften the learning curve for others.

What’s the benefit of learning how to use graphic design and multimedia software? Well, these communications skills can be valuable across a range of contexts, spanning from social media and digital marketing work, to developing easily understandable materials for internal or client-facing presentations. Being able to elegantly present and express ideas using multimedia will undoubtedly make you an asset as businesses become even more data-driven, and are constantly on the lookout for ways to simplify and streamline the process of gathering, understanding, and responding to data. And that all starts with human-centric communications and design.

User Interface/User Experience Design

Speaking of human-centric design, the look, feel, and function of websites, device apps, and complete application suites fall under the high value methodologies of UI/UX. User interface (or UI) design involves organising an application's widgets (entry forms, pull-down menus, toggle buttons, etc.) to improve users' attention and workflows.

Keeping these visual elements consistent across delivery presentations, including smartphone, tablet, desktop, and web browsers, is the main focus of UI. Mastering these skills allows you to design dynamic, intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing interfaces that perform optimally on multiple platforms while ensuring accessibility to those with disabilities.

User Experience (or UX) designers factor in preferences and behaviours to guide the design process. This involves surveys and acceptance testing to uncover bottlenecks as quality assurance testers interact with applications.

Prototyping and wireframing with tools such as Adobe XD allow programmers to build low-bandwidth mockups to visualise and test interactive design concepts with various interface elements, including icons, images, symbols, and shapes.

Using these robust tools for prototyping reduces development timeframes by allowing testers to experience the functionality and workflow of digital products before they’re fully developed.

Cybersecurity

The need for security-specialised technicians has never been greater. There are several niches where you can begin your cybersecurity journey at home to build a solid foundation for further in-depth professional training.

Start with the fundamentals. Learn about malware like worms, viruses, Trojan horses, and ransomware. These malicious code injections aim to damage, disrupt, and subjugate computer systems for profit.

Phishing attacks are social engineering attempts where employees and individuals are deceived into revealing credit card numbers, passwords, or other sensitive information through fraudulent means.

For instance, you might receive an unusual email requesting that you log into a specific website, which is a spoof of a trusted organisation. These types of data breaches routinely lead to the disclosure of data on open channels, financial losses, legal consequences, and reputational damage for affected companies and governments.

Ethical Hacking is a skill you can practise in your spare time, which allows you to gain experience in simulating cyber attacks. Also known as penetration testing, the process involves using tools to identify poor security settings and misconfiguration, which attackers would exploit in their quest to gain access and create havoc.

Shady worldwide organisations have entire staffs dedicated to discovering vulnerabilities to steal user data, personal financial information, and other malicious conduct.

Learning how to discover these security holes and patch vulnerable hardware and code makes you extremely valuable to the highest-paying organisations. Increasing your knowledge of encryption best practices, firewalls, and access control is something you can begin today.

Cloud Computing

Delivering specific computing services over the internet is what the generic Cloud terminology we frequently hear about refers to. This industry has forever altered how companies and individuals access data and applications.

In this virtualised, datacenter-based world, service providers partition valuable computing power to customers via bare-metal and virtual machines, storage, and networking resources. Small and large organisations no longer need to bear the considerable costs of onsite hardware and its ongoing maintenance expenses.

IT professionals now have a variety of Cloud niches to choose from, all offering substantial salaries for the highest-demand roles. There’s also a growing demand for cloud computing skills in the cybersecurity and security industries, so if you think you may be interested in undertaking government work, then that’s yet another reason to start engaging with the basics of cloud computing.

To get started in this new and expansive world, we recommend learning about Infrastructure (Iaas), Software (SaaS), and Platform (Paas). Once you’re familiar with these disciplines, then decide which field best suits your background. Combine security with cloud computing, and you have a powerful career pathway with endless opportunities for advancement.

Build a Bright Future by Learning these Tech Skills