COVID-19 has led to widespread layoffs and job losses across industries, with hospitality, travel, and retail hit especially hard. After the pandemic, many of those jobs are not expected to come back. At the same time, hiring for technical roles in software engineering and data science has skyrocketed: Remote interviews for technical roles grew by 370% on HackerRank’s platform from 2019 to 2020 as companies pivoted business online. The shortage of talent to fill those roles continues in 2021—hiring managers are worried about recruiting enough developers this year. With the right infrastructure, these are ideal conditions for a unique, more diverse generation of tech employees to emerge and fill the open positions. This can come to fruition in two main ways: companies offering technical reskilling programs for their own employees and outside talent, and people embracing nontraditional technical education options such as coding boot camps and self-teaching. Internal reskilling programs thrive in a remote-first world During COVID-19, most companies have found themselves needing more software developers and fewer employees on the ground or in service roles. They can use remote training tools to transition nontechnical employees into technical roles. With intuitive virtual tools, companies can still assess and train workers remotely during the pandemic. Amazon’s Tech Academy is a great example. The program, part of Amazon’s $700 million investment in upskilling , is open to any nontechnical employee (such as truck drivers and warehouse maintenance staff). It provides intensive reskilling with the goal of hiring students as Amazon software developers
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Why it’s the perfect time to learn to be an engineer or data scientist