5 Digital Skills Companies Are Looking For

From the outside it might look like your typical tech worker is some guy wearing a hoodie, cargo shorts and sandals coding all day. But digital skills are so much more than that. No matter what industry you’re looking into after high school, there are going to be loads of jobs looking for these skills:

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes

User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) designers work closely together to manage how customers and users interact with digital products and services. There’s nothing more frustrating than an app or site that feels difficult to use, or gets in the way of you having fun - and that’s what UX/UI designers are there to fix. The really cool thing about UX/UI design is how it combines different areas of study and skills, like design and behavioural psychology, to create a role that’s creative, but also analytical.

As UX/UI designer, it’s important to understand how to make using your product feel exciting and rewarding, as well as having experience in a field like visual design to understand how to make a site look appealing. But it’s not just about designing the site - you have to either build it yourself, or be able to explain to a developer how it’s going to work. According to Talent.com, the average UX/UI designer salary is around $105,000 a year.

Creatively coming up with a catchy headline or title

When you’re looking for a good restaurant near you, the recipe for that latest TikTok trend, or how often you’re supposed to wash your bedsheets, the first thing you’re going to do is look it up on a search engine or the social media app of your choice. Then, if we’re being honest, you’re probably going to click on the first or second result you see, because the search engine is telling you it’s the most relevant result.

But how did that page make it to the top of your results? Behind every high-ranking page are professionals doing something called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The job is to make your website look really good to the little bots that search engines use to catalogue the internet. This involves techniques such as using key words, including headlines and topics, and encouraging people to share your site’s links on other popular websites.

If you do any kind of writing or content creation online, then SEO is a great skill to have in your arsenal. Or, if SEO is really your passion, you could become an SEM (Search Engine Marketer), where you could earn anywhere between $62,000 to $122,084!

Coming up with something fun to do

I don’t think I need to explain why being a video game developer is such a cool job. If you’re interested in a career in tech and love gaming, you could use your passions to peek behind the curtains and see how some of your favourite franchises get made. Video game developers come from a huge range of backgrounds and skill sets. Some indie game developers are jack-of-all-trades, managing things like visual design, gameplay, bug testing and marketing all on their own. House House, the Aussie studio behind the viral hit Untitled Goose Game, sold over 100,000 copies of their game in just two weeks with a team of just four developers.

If you’re interested in working in a big games developer like Naughty Dog, Rockstar or Bethesda, you’re more likely to specialise in one task, such as building the physics engine or animating the cutscenes. To be a game developer, you’ll need the skills to code in the language your target platform uses, as well as an understanding of game mechanics and theory. According to Seek, the average annual salary for a Game Developer is between $80,000 and $100,000.

Making your socials stick out from the crowd

You know how you’re swiping away on Insta or TikTok and you immediately blow past an ad or a post from a brand without even looking at it? Your challenge working in social media is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Engagement and fame is a fickle thing, but if you have a gift for making content that grabs eyeballs, you can make a huge impact for your company, customer or client.

The trick is that just loving to use social media apps isn’t quite enough to become a pro, just like how loving to go to restaurants doesn’t make you a great chef. If you’re interested in becoming a social media pro, you need to get out there and start making organic (that is, not promoted) content! As you go, you’ll want to become a jack of all trades, getting involved in things such as graphic design, video production, and analytics to measure your success.

You can also look into more marketing-related roles, where you’ll be running ads on popular platforms. You’ll need to be able to target your audience, set budgets and tweak your content to optimise your results. Social media roles really vary in salary, starting from around $55k - but as you progress you can become very valuable to employers.

Having an eye for what’s on-trend and looks good

Someone who says that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover clearly hasn’t been to a bookstore. We’re generally pretty visual creatures, and we use logos, websites, packaging and advertising to convince each other that our goods and services are high-quality and appealing.

While it’s easy to think that it’s about picking out some bright colours and trendy fonts and calling it a day, great graphic design is hard to achieve without developing your skills. Using skill areas such as typography, graphic design principles, alignment, and colour theory will help you lift your game and turn your designs from good to great.

When it comes to skills, you’ll also want to be handy with some or all of the more popular graphic design applications - software like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator are considered to be powerful enough for most jobs, but some designers are using programs like Blender to render 3D graphics as well.
The awesome thing about these skills is that you don’t have to go to uni to pick them up. If you’re keen to find out how you can get your digital skills up to speed, make sure you check out our Academy Digiskills for all the deets!