Blockchain Technology: What Could It Mean for the Present Job Market?

Ever since the emergence of Bitcoin, from there on, the world around cryptocurrency hasn’t stood still. What kind of impact could technology have behind Bitcoin? As Tapscott Group CEO Don Tapscott says, the technology underpinning cryptocurrency has the ability to revolutionize the world’s economy using state of the art cryptography. Blockchain is probably one of the most talked-about technology today. In fact, it is the buzzword going around the job market for quite a long time now. Although there’s hype, the implementation has turned a deaf ear.

In 2020, it is estimated that the blockchain industry will witness a hype that will go beyond cryptocurrency. As we’re aware, AWS (Amazon Web Services) has started democratizing blockchain with their subscription BaaS (Blockchain as a service) platform. Besides AWS, there are other global leaders that have started getting into the blockchain space. To name a few are Microsoft, Samsung, Alibaba, and IBM. What’s even more interesting is that we’re now being able to witness real use cases.

What is blockchain technology?

Blockchain, the technology that is immutable is a public ledger of information that is collected through a network. It is neither an app nor company but is an entirely a new method of safeguarding data online. This technology can be used for various purposes such as denoting a transfer of funds, transactions, someone’s identity, an agreement between two parties, and even transfer of ownership.

Blockchain uses a decentralized consensus that helps maintain the network. This network isn’t controlled by a bank, government or a corporation. As a matter of fact, the larger the network grows the stronger it gets and gradually becomes decentralized. This technology is not at all restricted to just Bitcoin. Off late, it has gained a lot of traction in other sectors such as arts, commerce, manufacturing, charities and financial services, etc.

How does it function?

Whenever a new transaction takes place or even an edit that needs to happen, most nodes within the blockchain implementation executes the algorithm in order to verify the transaction that is taking place. When the majority of these nodes comes to a consensus stating the history and the signature to be valid, that is when the new block is being accepted into the ledger. Once it is accepted, it is then added to the chain of other blocks of transactions. And it does not concede, it gets denied and it is not added to the chain. Only because of this distributed consensus model blockchain technology is able to run as a distributed ledger without the need for third-party validation.

The demand for blockchain professional keeps mounting but the job market is yet to fill these job vacancies due to a shortage of skill. With several newer job roles that were announced for tech experts skilled in blockchain, blockchain professionals remain high in demand.

According to LinkedIn, blockchain job was said to rank no.1 emerging job skill. LinkedIn also states that the number of job openings had grown 33-fold over the year in 2018.

The topmost sought after skills in blockchain technology included Solidity (programming language) that we used for developing smart contracts, cryptocurrency development, Node.js, Ethereum (which is an open-source blockchain including a cryptocurrency).

The major reason for the sudden uprise in blockchain job roles is because enterprise projects have obtained a maturity level over the past three years, and now are venturing from proof of concept to pilots and to production systems.

If you’re looking forward to staying robust and upgrade your professional career, then perhaps taking up a certification program in blockchain will certainly work.