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What employers look for in blockchain aspirants

By James Smith | 26 April 2021

You have searched the internet, watched a bunch of online tutorials, and have familiarised yourself with all of those fancy, modern tech terms … So now you’re ready for a career in blockchain, right?

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, as discovered during the latest ATMC/Employability.life IT Job Pathway webinar, which focussed on the exciting world of blockchain.

“The one attribute I would really be looking for in job applicants would be how expert you are at one particular technology; whatever software engineering language it is you are into. It doesn’t matter which one,” Kunal Chhabra, Chief Technology Officer at ASTS, told webinar participants.

“I would also be looking at how open you are to learning another language. After all, blockchain technologies don’t all necessarily use the same behind-the-scenes coding.”

Kunal, who has worked with Fortune 500 companies spanning across consumer banking, international banking and markets, home lending, cards and payments and airlines and manufacturing, generously explained his very interesting introduction to the industry.

“I actually began my blockchain career on a more experimental basis. I used to work with a lot of banks and often spoke with trade companies, financial services and supply chain companies. I began to realise blockchain had more potential than a lot of people might think. It has begun to move into the mainstream. I feel there’s much more to blockchain than just cryptocurrency.”

 

 

The webinar’s other guest, Raj Kapoor, founder of the Blockchain Alliance, holds similar views to Kanal as to blockchain’s potential. “I bought my first two bitcoin back in 2011 or 2012,” says Raj, an accomplished tech innovation professional, blockchain and cryptocurrency educator, Certified Bitcoin Professional (CBP) and blockchain solution architect.

“I always tell people, ‘Yes, I was attracted by the bitcoin, but that itself is not blockchain.’ I went in for the speculation, but I stayed for the revolution … That revolution is blockchain. I now have a wealth of experience having worked with this thing called blockchain, which is where the real magic is.”

If, after hearing so much about blockchain, you are still unsure what it is and what it does, Raj offers up the perfect explanation.  

“Basically, blockchain is all of your online data in the one basket. It is like that old saying: “all your eggs in one basket”. Except now, instead of putting 12 eggs into one basket, we have 12 eggs in 12 different baskets, so your data now gets disintermediated and decentralised and therefore is safer than how your data used to be stored.”

This webinar was moderated by Software Engineering Manager at NICE inContact Joshua Stroup. It was hosted by Marketa Moses, Program Manager at Employability.life/ATMC and Anirudh Phadke, Head of Digital Content and Emerging Technologies at ATMC.

The IT Job Pathway webinars continue Thursday, April 29 with the final session of our IT series focussing on Machine Learning. We hope to see you all there!