Crucial Blockchain Skills Needed to Transform Your Business

It’s been said that Blockchain technology is poised to transform and disrupt the entire landscape of businesses if it ever goes mainstream. More and more businesses have realized the advantages of using Blockchain, with the number of Blockchain-related job postings in 2017 increasing by more than 6.3 times what the demand was in 2015. The problem is that there aren’t enough blockchain developers out there, with 14 job postings for each developer. Most of these developers are basically self-taught.

So if you’re going to make use of this exciting new technology, you may have to educate your own developers yourself.

What’s Blockchain?

Blockchain is basically a digital ledger that keeps a record of all the transactions that it monitors. These transactions are stored in chronological order, and they’re pretty much permanent. They can’t be changed and they’re even impervious to hacking.

This is why it’s used for cryptocurrency transactions like for Bitcoin. Now each party won’t have to store their own version of a transaction in their database. Now each party can instead consult the same ledger for more accurate information, which is recorded in real time.

How Can It Help Your Business?

Walmart provides the template that showcases the benefits of blockchain even for non-cryptocurrency transactions. Its effect on supply chain management is revolutionary.

Walmart gets its food supplies from various sources, including China. Their blockchain program tracks all these food products as they move up the chain, from the farmer to the food processor, to the food distributors and on to the retail stores.

So if there’s a report that a retail store has sold contaminated goods, Walmart can then trace back the origins of the food product and easily find out where it came from and where it became contaminated. Conversely, if a farmer reports that their food products have been contaminated, then they can be traced to their current locations and pulled off the shelves.

Before blockchain, tracking the movement of the food products across the supply chain would have involved checking various systems and going over numerous documents on paper. Now with blockchain, tracing the provenance of a product can take only minutes or even seconds. It’s that efficient.

Skills Your Developers Will Need

Yes, they will need skills like the ability to prioritize tasks, teamwork, and time management. But for the most part your developers will need the following:

A bachelor’s or master’s degree in Engineering or Computer Science.
At least 2 years of professional experience working as a software engineer. It’s much better if this experience was gained in the finance sector.
Familiarity with ledgers, consensus methods, blockchains, and cryptocurrencies in general.
Formidable proficiency in threat analytics, anomaly detection, and performance management.
Expert grasp of algorithms, data structures, cryptography, and data security, and decentralized technologies.
Expert coding skills with any of the following languages: Go, C, C++, Java, or Python.
Familiarity with distributed storage such as RDBMS or NoSQL.
Some experience in producing blockchain frameworks and business applications.

There are numerous online courses that can help, and you should start enrolling your developers in those programs.

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