Unlock Your New Career With These In-Demand Job Skills

1. Digital Marketing Skills

Looking for a career that’s competitive, creative and exciting? Then digital marketing could be for you. This fast-paced career involves promoting brands and products via website content, blogs, social media posts, e-newsletters and text campaigns.

Who employs digital marketers?

• Small businesses
• Marketing departments
• Digital agencies
• Design agencies
• Advertising agencies

Which digital marketing skills are in demand?

This data-driven industry requires a combination of creative and technical skills, so if you’re an aspiring digital marketer, you’ll need a flair for copywriting and PR as well as the ability to master a range of marketing tools. These include Google AdWords, Mailchimp, Adobe Creative Cloud and Google Analytics.

Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram also play a crucial role in digital marketing, so social media skills are essential, as is the ability to carry out search engine optimisation. Google’s Digital Garage videos are a good starting point for SEO newbies.

2. UX Design Skills

User experience design is all about improving the design of digital products and services so that they’re more user-friendly. By bringing UX designers on board, businesses and developers can ensure that their websites and mobile apps look great, run smoothly and are enjoyable to use.

Who employs UX designers?

• The education sector
• Finance companies
• The health sector
• Publishing
• Telecommunications
• Marketing companies
• Broadcasting companies
• Public bodies
• Charities
• Digital agencies
• Web development agencies

Which UX design skills are in high demand?

A solid understanding of HTML is essential for UX design roles, but employers are also keen to employ people with a working knowledge of commonly used software such as Azure, InVision, Marvel, OmniGraffle, Sketch and the Adobe Creative Suite.

As well as having the right skills, aspiring designers need to gain some relevant work experience in order to create a portfolio. So if you’re keen on a career in UX design, why not ask to take on a small project for your current employer or offer to improve the website of a local charity or community project?

LinkedIn is also a great place to look for opportunities, as many employers use the network to advertise internships. Once you’ve gained some experience, add any design work you’ve produced to your portfolio and share your work on social media or blog about it.

Learning about the design industry’s latest trends is also crucial if you want a career in UX, so we recommend joining a few specialist LinkedIn groups. This is also a great way to start making connections with the UX community.

What qualifications do UX designers need?

A degree in computer science, graphic design or another subject that includes a design or computing element will give you a head start when it comes to finding work as a UX designer. If you already have a solid grasp of HTML and the software used in UX work, any degree is acceptable, although a masters degree in UX Design will boost your chances of bagging your dream job! There are also a few apprenticeships up for grabs.

What does the role involve?

UX designers spend their time meeting clients to discuss their requirements, sketching visual concepts, creating user journeys, developing personas and coming up with prototypes. They also carry out usability testing and redesign websites.

If you become a designer, you’ll work across various platforms including mobiles, tablets and computers. Teamwork is an important part of UX design work, so expect to collaborate with other designers, engineers, business analysts and project managers.

How to Know When It’s Time to Make a Career Change

Influence of Current Job On Mental and Physical Health

Usually, when you are attempting to change jobs, you are unsure about making the move into unknown territory which sometimes can feel like a gamble.  However, in the long run, changing jobs and even professions can be extremely rewarding and bring with it greater job satisfaction.

The first step to knowing when it is time to make a career change, as simple as it sounds, is to take a step back and ask yourself why it is that you are thinking of changing jobs.  Considering changing jobs can range from a whole host of reasons such as not liking the company that you currently work for to feeling underappreciated.  In many instances, individuals feel that their workload is a primary factor in influencing their decisions as they either feel over-worked or not mentally challenged.  It can be helpful to try to pinpoint one or two specific reasons and assess the extent to which they are logical reasons for precipitating a career move.  For example, dealing with challenging co-workers could be resolved by discussing the issues with your manager whereas an issue such as the job negatively affecting your personal life probably merits a career change.

Assess and Reflect On Why You Want a Career Change

A vital sign that it is time to make a career change is when your job is negatively affecting your health whether that is physically, mentally or both.  While many people get in a rut with their work and it is common to sometimes not feel overly enthusiastic towards your job, if your work is causing you to feel drained of energy and permanently exhausted, it may well be time to re-assess the situation.  The British mental health charity Mind states that at least one in six workers experience common mental health problems such as anxiety and depression in the workplace.  If your job is causing you to stay awake at night and you are finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning this is a surefire sign that your job is taking its toll on your mental health.

Burn out from stress can also manifest itself in your physical health as your immune system becomes less effective in fighting off colds and viruses.  Stress can reveal itself in a range of symptoms from insomnia to cold sores to migraines.  Therefore, if you are finding that your job is affecting your health it is crucial to address this and make the necessary changes.

Assess the Pros and Cons of Moving Jobs

An excellent way to assess and come to a decision about whether it is the right time to make a career change is to split a piece of paper into two sections and list both the pros and cons of leaving your current job for the one that you have in mind. Such a big life change is always going to be a step out of your comfort zone but weighing up the factors with a logical mindset will help you come to a decision.

Some of the factors that should be taken into consideration involve how long it would take to commute, the comparison of salaries and the likelihood of how much stress the new job would entail. Writing these factors down on paper will help you to come to a well-balanced conclusion.

Ways to Make a Career Change

There are several ways to prepare you for making a career change that will help to make the transition smoother. Ensuring a plan of action such as establishing when you intend on handing in your notice and will start to look for jobs will help you to feel as if you know what you are working towards. Saving money is also a good idea as it will ensure that you have finances to tide you by until you get paid in your new job. Researching into new career paths and employment is a helpful step to take to allow you to figure out if there is a particular job in another field that you would be better suited to having.

Another good way to prepare you for making a career change is to get advice off others whether that is from a friend, family member or a career adviser. It can be overwhelming to make such an important decision alone so seeking out advice, especially professional advice, can help you realise what options you have on the table. Career fares and networking events are a beneficial way to receive information and discover how you can upgrade your current skill set to widen your career prospects.

Open Industry 4.0 Alliance: An Open Ecosystem for the Digital Transformation of Industrial Manufacturing Plants

Members of the alliance are committed to creating a standardized and open ecosystem for operating highly automated factories and plants, including logistics and services. The alliance is working to avoid proprietary stand-alone solutions to better enable digital transformation in European industry. The companies plan to work with future members to create what is known as an Open Industry 4.0 Framework on the basis of existing standards such as IO-Link, OPC UA and RAMI.

Focus on Feasibility and Benefits

Operations in factories, plants and logistics centers in midmarket and large enterprises are characterized by heterogeneity — with things of many different classes, from many different manufacturers. Proprietary and varying standards in connectivity, data management, IT security and collaboration create additional effort and impede the rapid and comprehensive scaling of Industry 4.0. The founders and members of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance pledged to provide customers with an open, standards-based, and compatible offering for a product’s entire journey — from the object on the factory floor to service.

Customers can select what they need from a set of modular, compatible and scalable solution and service components. In each case, these build on the core competencies of the founders and members of the alliance and represent a low-risk, manufacturer-independent option from existing and known suppliers in the discrete manufacturing and process engineering industries. The connection to SAP solutions helps ensure that business processes such as manufacturing execution, warehouse management or plant maintenance are collaborative across company boundaries with partner companies.

Open and Interoperable Solution

The open, standards-based offering of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance includes four modules — Device Connectivity, Edge, Operator Cloud, and Cloud Central — plus an associated service offering. Device Connectivity establishes the connection to the machines and sensors. Edge is the central node for all the important and locally necessary functions in the factory. Operator Cloud is the central node in the customer’s company that an open layer and supports all enterprise-centric functions and applications. Finally, Cloud Central enables the bidirectional exchange of data between companies, such as master data and measurement data from calibrations, as well as information including technical documentation and repair manuals.

The first proofs of concept were completed in 2018, with adaptable and flexible matrix production at KUKA. The aim is to produce additional proofs of concept from members and their customers by mid-2019. The founding members are preparing their first results for the second half of 2019.

Latest Version of SAP HANA Empowers All Business Users to Make Confident, Intelligent Decisions Fast

Updates include enhanced cloud support, persistent memory support with Intel, intelligent recommendations for efficient database management, new machine learning (ML) capabilities, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) certification, improved cost-effective data tiering and data security enhancements. These SAP HANA innovations help organizations be more intelligent, agile and efficient.

“SAP HANA is the heart and soul of SAP,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, senior vice president of SAP HANA and Analytics at SAP. “The latest release of SAP HANA brings the power of data and in-memory computing to the masses by empowering organizations with a deeper understanding of their business for making the right decisions in the moment. More than 28,000 customers are using SAP HANA to achieve real-time, end-to-end awareness of their businesses. Companies finally have a single business data platform to process information coming from all channels to drive continuous innovation, predict business outcomes and uncover new business opportunities.”

SAP HANA now scales cost-efficiently by offering customers the flexibility and choice of managing data and running applications across multi-cloud, hybrid and on-premise environments. The latest release improves application performance with increased memory capacity, while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) through enhanced data tiering with the new SAP HANA native storage extension and support for the new Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory modules.

“We evaluated the new persistent memory technology from Intel with two of our existing SAP HANA systems and experienced greater than 400 percent improvement in data load times at startup, which will really help maintain business continuity for planned maintenance and more,” said Daniel Rothmund, IT manager for SAP Development and Innovation at Geberit, a European leader of sanitary products.

“When we moved our data warehouse and SAP ERP system from Oracle to SAP HANA we experienced performance improvements, greater cost savings, and a 72 percent reduction in database volume,” Rothmund said. “Continued innovation with SAP HANA guarantees we have the most intelligent digital platform to make more timely, informed decisions for our customers.”

Lisa Davis, vice president and general manager, Digital Transformation & Scale Solutions, Enterprise & Government, Data Center Group at Intel said: “The new persistent memory technology from Intel enables more data capacity, lower platform TCO, and faster insights, and allows more virtual machines to be stored on a single system, significantly reducing hardware requirements. SAP HANA is the first major data management platform optimized for this breakthrough innovation, and the enhanced features for data tiering are extremely complementary. It allows for faster recovery time for SAP HANA, which helps to minimize planned or unplanned downtime, reducing cloud operating expenses while providing a highly resilient application environment.”

Customers benefit from intelligence built into SAP HANA that accelerates IT and data science operations by automatically processing analytical and transactional workloads in real time for any data type. The new Python and R machine learning APIs enable data scientists to work in familiar environments while directly accessing data as well as powerful in-database ML capabilities in SAP HANA. The latest version also provides database administrators with intelligent recommendations for SQL optimization, data tiering and more.

SAP HANA modernizes data management by extending broad multi-cloud support and extreme flexibility for cloud, hybrid and on-premise deployments. SAP offers HCI providers certification for SAP HANA to bring cloudlike infrastructure agility to all landscapes. By supporting an advanced approach to data virtualization, SAP HANA continues to enhance its ability to seamlessly connect data everywhere. In addition, SAP HANA was the first data platform to anonymize personal data in real time without duplication. Now, with these further enhancements, SAP HANA offers end-to-end data privacy management.

SAP Unveils Two New Patient Management Solutions for Healthcare

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud for patient accounting and SAP Patient Administration solutions address the needs of healthcare providers for flexible and extensible cloud services supported by intelligent technologies that will help break down legacy structural and technological barriers in healthcare.

As healthcare providers transition to value-based care models, SAP S/4HANA Cloud for patient accounting and SAP Patient Administration help set the foundation for optimizing business operations while improving the patient experience.

“The ever-increasing costs and the growing demand for health services are leading to an urgent need for better strategies to optimize patient care and improve prevention and operational efficiency,” said Barbara Schmücking from the German SAP User Group (DSAG). “The sector needs solutions to transform the networked processes of healthcare providers, to improve the collaboration of all those involved in the treatment process, and to enable smart medicine and personalized patient care at all levels.”

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for patient accounting uses artificial intelligence technology to automate patient billing, payment handling and case-cost analytics. It enables billing teams to create more accurate invoices using rule checks, sort billing cases by business relevance and analyze revenue cycle efficiencies. As a result, healthcare providers can reduce administration tasks and accelerate reimbursements while reducing overall costs.

SAP Patient Administration helps to improve the patient experience by improving the patient scheduling and registration process. It enables online preregistration and patient self-check-in that will reduce patient waiting times and cut administrative burden through digital health information capture. Accurate, up-to-date information from patients will expedite claims processing, adjudication and reimbursement.

Both solutions have been co-innovated with leading healthcare providers, leading into a first release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud for patient accounting designed to streamline outpatient surgery billing in Germany. Future releases plan to include additional German billing types, and versions designed to handle mandated regulations in other regions and countries.

SAP believes in the innovation power of open ecosystems and industry standards and has a long-standing partnership with Cerner, a U.S.-based healthcare software provider whose i.s.h.med solution is celebrating its 25-year anniversary this year. It is the only hospital information system fully integrated with SAP’s healthcare solutions. To support the new wave of next-generation healthcare solutions, Cerner and SAP are reinventing i.s.h.med and patient administration on SAP Cloud Platform. The move reflects the two companies’ joint vision of applying innovative technology to assist professionals providing first-class medicine and care.

The seamless sharing of health information is critical to realizing this vision. Both Cerner and SAP are committed to accelerating healthcare interoperability by promoting and contributing to healthcare industry standards including the HL7 FHIR standard.

“Combining our two companies’ strengths allows us to help healthcare providers address their challenges using innovative solutions,” said Pascal Gilbert-Jeantet, vice president, business development, Strategic Global Alliances at Cerner. “Together we are creating a future where the healthcare system works to improve the well-being of individuals and communities.”

SAP Positioned as a Leader in 2019 Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools

"Data quality tools are vital for digital business transformation, especially now that many have emerging features like automation, machine learning, business-centric workflows and cloud deployment models,” said Gartner. “This Magic Quadrant assesses 15 vendors to help you make the best choice for your organization.”

In the report, Gartner identified SAP as a Leader for its ability to execute and completeness of vision for the 13th consecutive time.**

“With a comprehensive portfolio of enterprise information management (EIM) solutions, including data quality as a core capability, SAP helps customers and partners become intelligent enterprises,” said Byron Banks, VP, Platform and Technologies Marketing at SAP. “As the industry moves from traditional IT-driven data quality tools to intelligent, business-driven ones, we believe this recognition from Gartner continues to show our leadership and excellence in this market.”

SAP solutions for EIM help customers manage Big Data and information so they can develop more efficient business processes and drive meaningful analytical insights. Users can govern data proactively across the organization and ensure trustworthy information for smarter decision-making. Data quality solutions from SAP help companies discover, refine, manage and orchestrate multifaceted data across distributed landscapes. Companies can profile, cleanse, enrich and match customer, product, supplier, material and other data domains, resulting in more accurate, reliable and timely information.

Next-Generation Support from SAP Leverages Machine Learning and AI to Improve Customer Experience

Through the integration of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), these intelligent tools are helping to automate the customer support experience and deliver targeted results in a shorter amount of time.

“The overall mission of the Next-Generation Support approach from SAP is to minimize the effort and time required by SAP customers, while maximizing their business outcomes,” said Andreas Heckmann, global senior vice president and head of customer success services, SAP Digital Business Services, SAP. “The Intelligent Enterprise requires speed and precision, and the continued integration of machine learning and AI into the Next-Generation Support concept has enabled us to provide just that. These intelligent technologies enable our support tools and support specialists to learn from the past and deliver accurate solutions for inquiries in real time as well as customized, proactive recommendations before an incident shows up.”

In an effort to raise the bar in customer support, SAP Digital Business Services continues to leverage machine learning and AI to optimize its real-time support experience for customers and its built-in support features:

• Incident solution matching: Through the recent addition of incident solution matching to SAP ONE Support Launchpad, SAP customers get customized recommendations ranked according to semantic relevance. This new tool leverages natural language processing to analyze an incident as the user types information about the incident into the form and provides relevant information from the SAP Knowledge Base Article service and the SAP Notes service. SAP Digital Business Services plans further integration of machine learning and AI, saving SAP customers time and helping them be more cost-efficient.
• Built-in support: SAP continues to build support into its products. Already part of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, built-in support is now available for SAP Integrated Business Planning, a solution to enable the intelligent enterprise by making planning easier, faster and In a continued effort to optimize the customer support experience, the built-in support concept moves support into the product, increases personalization and fosters collaboration among experts.

“The SAP CoPilot digital assistant, with its built-in support, provides customers of the SAP Integrated Business Planning solution quick access to SAP from within the application to get support and share their ideas to improve our product further. Built-in support also helps SAP provide efficient support as context information about the app and the actual system is automatically shared through customer incident information,” says Franz Hero, senior vice president and head of development, Transportation and Logistics Application Innovation, SAP.

The direction for product support is clear. Integrated into SAP CoPilot, conversational AI makes it possible for customers to converse with the system, while the digital assistant uses the system context and other data to provide fast answers for customers’ technical questions. In the future, some questions won’t even have to be asked, with the digital assistant in the application giving customers all the support and information they need to avoid potential problems.

With the live support services Expert Chat and Schedule an Expert, the customer experience is being continuously improved as those tools are extended to additional solutions, enabling customers to get in touch directly with a support expert from SAP. With machine learning and AI working in the background, support specialists are equipped with the information necessary to provide targeted recommendations in live sessions:

• Schedule an Expert: SAP customers can now schedule a 30-minute Skype session with an SAP expert. This new live channel is already available for over 50 SAP solutions and was recently made available for customers’ open incidents. In 2018, SAP customers using Schedule an Expert reduced their interactions for incidents by up to 52 percent, which freed up considerable time for customers and engineers to deal with other important tasks.
• Expert Chat: SAP customers can open a live chat for incidents and start a conversation with the same SAP expert who works on traditional incidents. Currently, 20 percent of the incoming incident volume represents customers using Expert Chat to get answers to their technical questions.

A wide range of self-service options complements these services, giving customers a way to find answers quickly themselves.