Make the Most of Your Time in Quarantine by Learning These New Tech Skills

As the global community embraces the practice of social distancing, some of us may have found ourselves with a lot of free time on our hands. Unless you are an active telecommuter who is still performing your daily tasks remotely, chances are you are gradually running out of things to do at home. 

You’re all caught up with your favorite Netflix shows, you’ve spent hours on Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you’ve done all the house chores and are now probably just hoping for the pandemic threat to be over—but what next till then?

In this article, we will show you how to make the most of your time in quarantine by nurturing some tech skills that are going to significantly boost your employability. While we wait for the good news, it is important to invest our time in things that will affect our lives positively. On top of that, being productive will reduce your anxiety and negative emotions brought by the overwhelming situation that we are currently living in.

Here are some of the most interesting tech skills that you can pick up while exercising movement control at home:

UI and UX Design

UI refers to user interface design, while UX refers to user experience design. Both UI and UX designs work together to provide a seamless experience. They are both equally important factors for brand engagement and customer satisfaction.

Although UI and UX designs are highly important across industries, they are considered indispensable skills for tech companies. As the numbers of tech companies grow over the years, the same goes for design roles, resulting in positions such as UI and UX designers. These roles are typically involved in website or software development. 

What’s the difference between the two? UI refers to the way a user interacts with a computer device or digital product. It can be a seamless experience if the digital product is intuitive and easy-to-use. There are several specifications related to UI which include the graphical user interface, touch user interface, voice user interface, and natural language interface, among others. 

Meanwhile, a UX designer is in charge of creating a more enjoyable experience for the users. When you think about design, the first thing that comes to mind is artistic work. Although it does involve creativity, UX design relies more on functionality and analysis. 

If you are interested in embarking on the UI/UX career path, there are several places where you can pick up this tech skill. Schools like LearningFuze or Bloc are currently offering completely remote bootcamps where you can learn everything about the subjects.

Full Stack Development 

Web and software development has two main specifications—front end and back end. Both are very important in the process of creating a digital product and most of the time, front end and back end developers work together to ensure a seamless experience for all users. However, there is also a rare position whose roles comprise both areas—a full stack developer. 

While most developers usually specialize in either one of the areas, some choose to do both. Employing a full stack developer can greatly benefit a company for multiple reasons including reduced communication issues, reduced costs, and convenience.

Some of the tasks involved in this role are building user-facing websites, working with databases, and programming in several languages like HTML, Java, and CSS. A full-stack developer works across all platforms such as websites and mobile applications. 

If you have some knowledge or new-found interests in web development or software development, it might be worth it to pick up some new skills that are relevant to this career option. If you need to learn the fundamentals, there are also some bootcamp options to consider such as Lambda School and App Academy.

Data Science

Data science is one of the key areas that companies need in order to make wise business decisions. Today’s businesses can gather huge sets of important data which can be of no use, if not interpreted accurately. This is where a data scientist comes in.

Data science is a profession that covers a lot of ground and the role is in great demand. With average salaries ranging from $95,000 to $185,000 annually, you can see why data science makes it into our list. 

There are several aspects to data science such as data analysis, predictive data analysis, data engineering, and deep data engineering, among others. Basically, the job of a data analyst or data scientist is to come up with a solution for a business problem based on the company’s data set. 

Data analysts find data in different sources such as the company’s database or website logs. We can call this process data acquisition. Data scientists must filter or scrape that data to find relevant patterns that would show something important about the nature of the problem.

After they find and clean this data, it’s time to analyze the outcomes and share the discoveries. This last part is done by using data visualization, which will make the results easily digestible to everyone including non-techies. 

Data analysis and machine learning are complementary, so this is something that you’ll see a lot when learning data science because it optimizes the whole process. This is a very important profession that is shaping the future for different fields like medicine, marketing, and sales. Check out some of the best online bootcamps for data science here. 

Conclusion 

Learning a new skill while practicing social distancing will help reduce the anxiety level that comes with the uncertain situation that we live in. Pick a new skill—anything at all that interests you—and do some research on the best ways to nurture said skill.

If you are starting from scratch, there are several schools that are currently offering remote bootcamps so you can safely learn these skills from the comfort of your own home. Most of the bootcamps are between 4 to 15 weeks long depending on the intensity of your choice. The best part is, once you’re done with that, you can jump straight into a relevant job search!

Now just think about it…there are several important characters in our history that created amazing things while in isolation—William Shakespeare wrote King Lear and Isaac Newton came up with the theory of gravity, both while in plague quarantines. So maybe you can be the next genius of our history or if not, a few brand-new skills are pretty buzzworthy too.

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About the Author

Artur Meyster is the CTO of Career Karma (YC W19), an online marketplace that matches career switchers with coding bootcamps. He is also the host of the Breaking Into Startups podcast, which features people with non-traditional backgrounds who broke into tech.