“I Wasted 5 Years in IT Support” — Until I Discovered This

It is a silent crisis in the Indian IT industry. Mid level professionals are becoming aware of a harsh reality; they have spent years engaged in roles which no longer develop them. Arun was one of them, a support engineer, in Bengaluru. After five years in the position, he was stuck. His work that he was so much proud of was a dead end. The situation had to change. All that was to end when one night, he came across an artificial intelligence certification course by chance.

When Safe Feels Stuck

Support jobs are marketed as a sure way to get a foot into the technology industry and to many Indians, they are. But comfort can be a cage. Arun would work day after day and the days would merge into each other: he would fix password recovery, perform health checks, add new employees to obsolete software. It made ends meet, but it sucked the life out of him. “I wasn’t advancing". Stay busy; putting food on the table; just keeping working is what he remembers.

His anger wasn't unusual. The situation is reminiscent with thousands of Indian IT professionals, who are trained, able but stuck in systems that do not change. It is not innovation-based promotions but tenure-based promotions. When he miraculously woke up to notice that he has lagged so much behind his fellow students on automation, data or AI, it became daunting to regain ground.

Then came a shift. It was just one video on YouTube and turned into three, five. Within a short time, Arun got immersed in such topics as machine learning and neural networks. He did not know very much about them but he was fascinated with them. The more he got into it the more he learned: the industry was moving this way - and he was not on the highway yet.

A Sneak Peek of Career Pivot

People believe that to transition into AI or automation, you need a master degree or you need to quit your job. However, both of them were not manageable by Arun It is then that he found out more liquid alternatives-- more structured learning-- which could be undertaken after hours. A certification program in artificial intelligence was not as daunting as an academic one and more structured than the informal lessons. It provided him with all the necessary basis to begin making mini-projects by creating the simplest automation scripts, chatbots, and predictive models.

But the true change was the response of recruiters. And now that AI is part and parcel of so many processes, even a conceptual knowledge on how models work, where to implement them, and what data to get became a conversation point during interviews. Arun was not fully transformed into a machine learning engineer, but he has moved into an internal automation team where he started working on streamlining the repetitive support activities with the help of AI-based tools.

Arun is not the only one who does this. A recent NASSCOM research shows that by 2027, about 40 per cent of the tech talent in India will require upskilling into AI, data analytics and other overlapping technologies. More intriguing though is the emergence of hybrid professionals i.e. those who resettle old knowledge with new-age tools. It is in those places where highly specific programs, such as a certificate course in artificial intelligence can prepare workers who want to make the leap without having to relinquish their existing directions.

You're Not Too Late

This was the greatest mental block that Arun needed to eliminate: What if it is too late? The truth? The thing of being too late to learn has never been true but being too hard-headed to begin is. It was not monkey business. He had nights when he did not comprehend the algorithms. Days he would not be sure that such thing as AI was even meant to be used by a person like him. But it was this: the fear that I was going to end up on a dead-end street was too great to deal with compared to the fear that I would fail at doing something novel.

Making such a small step (just the enrolment in artificial intelligence certification course provided him with the momentum. And with the momentum came confidence and with confidence comes projects and projects come real change.

But, in case you are reading this at the point of professional dissatisfaction, this is to tell you that you need not discard the years of effort. Reinvention is also not the process of making a fresh start. It is simply the decision to develop in a more intelligent direction the direction in which the world is headed, not the direction in which it has been.