as technology becomes critical to careers and businesses many outside the technology field are trying to pick up newage digital skills twentytwoyearold anandita bhuyan is an mbbs and ba philosophy dropout she knew she was wired for fashion and wanted to apply technology to it the northeasterner deep dived into machine learning ml attended tech forums and taught herself ml nuances she used web scraping technologies to gather vast amounts of fashion data off the web she then applied technologies like image recognition on this data to categorise them into different buckets our ml models recognise design details colours patterns products personalisation trends sustainability trends human sentiments and we use these to provide insights to fashion brands says anandita who has a fashion analytics firm called moodboard analytics what traditionally would have taken weeks and months to do on excel sheets anandita can do in minutesas technology becomes critical to careers and businesses many outside the technology field are trying to pick up newage digital skills turning the conventional education system on its head almost all the skilling firms toi spoke to said the number of noncomputer science students attending their data science and analytics programmes is growing at jigsaw academy 1720 of learners are noncomputer science students at simplilearn it is 30 great learning cofounder hari krishnan nair says 50 of students for their data sciencerelated courses are from a nontechnical background up from 10 when they launched the courses in the last 1218 months we are seeing demand from chartered accountants doctors he says during the course nair says some learn to code more than others in languages like python and then begin to specialise in ai and ml its a natural progression of data science kartik shinde partner at consulting auditing firm ernst young says when auditing began to go digital nearly 15 years ago one could see chartered accountants picking up technological skills i dont think college or any other educational background really matters when it comes to technology skills people would still do well in them because for them moving on to a new area is guided by the survival instinct he sayskiruthiga babu a student says that while pursuing her masters in molecular life science in germany she took a shine to data science and decided to change tracks from a purely researchbased role it was initially tough but having spent a couple of months on basic coding i am now more inclined to take up a course on machine learning and pursue a codingrelated career she says dr vikas v a neurosurgeon at national institute of mental health and neuro sciences nimhans in bengaluru is pursuing a phd in surgical robotics from iiitbangalore hes trying to build a robot that can do surgeries i learnt coding way back in 1991 i have tried coding on genesis a computational neurobiology platform and have taken udacity online classes i know some amount of python says the doctor he has already pursued several projects