Insights from Head of Coaching

Dear Students,
 

Imagine you’re eager to enter finance and/or banking. And let’s assume you’ve had a few coding classes. Yet, while you know you need to learn more languages to increase your marketplace competitiveness, particularly in view of AI, you aren’t sure which to pursue. How do you decide?
 

While the article below, written by UK-based technology and fintech journalist Alex McMurray, provides comprehensive and detailed guidance in this area for ambitious international students like you, it also makes a few essential, often-overlooked points, from a broader, commercial perspective, toward the end of the piece.
 

With the increasing impact of AI, and particularly Generative AI, it’s hard to definitively say which programming language will be the “most enduring” and least “automate-able.” McMurray quotes a reader who shares the following insight, instead: “…the big thing [in hiring] is to have someone [on a team] who can keep up with change while also understanding business problems.”  To no one’s surprise, this means that although specific tech competencies may come and go out of favor, well-developed power skills will continue to be the differentiator among new hires like you.
 

Which kinds of power skills does he mean? Even simply from the brief quote above, candidates like you and your friends can easily deduce many of them:
 

Our coaches want to ensure that you also remember that when all is said and done, technology is yet another tool to address and resolve business problems, which are themselves challenges that must be initially identified, structured and “fed” into systems by humans. Moreover, power skills are vital, in that new grads like you and your peers will still play a meaningful role on the back end of the analytical process, in a variety of essential ways, while providing critical interface between data-driven results and business recommendations.