Rosselkhozbank spoke about the growing role of technical skills in the market of agro-industrial complex professions

The availability of technical skills to take full advantage of new technologies in the agro-industrial complex is gradually becoming an important criterion when evaluating a candidate for key positions in Russian agricultural companies. As for office professions, for representatives of the "field" professions, the ability to work with big data and databases is becoming increasingly important. This is evidenced by the data of a regular survey of vacancies in the agro-industrial complex, conducted by the Russian Agricultural Bank on the basis of the personnel search service on the Svoye Farming platform. The service brings together more than 10,000 vacancies in agriculture.

In the next decade, artificial intelligence, computer vision and robotics will play a key role in increasing labor productivity, and retraining of some agricultural specialists will be required. As the analysis of vacancies in the agro-industrial complex posted on the staff search service on the Svoe Farming platform shows, in 80% of cases, knowledge of technical programs is mandatory for representatives of traditional "field" professions. Moreover, every 6th agronomist vacancy contains a requirement for experience with GIS cartographic data, geographic information systems and databases.

“Under the influence of digitalization, agronomists are becoming data analysts – for specialists in this field, their own knowledge is no longer enough. With the advent of new technologies, accumulated expertise and practical knowledge have to be combined with various data sources, such as information from sensors or satellite images of fields. Precision farming is becoming an independent direction in agribusiness. Its task is to combine new technologies and the “insights” obtained on the basis of their application with the traditional agronomic approach, providing tools for aggregating, managing and analyzing data obtained using new precision farming tools,” explains Elena Baturova, DIRECTOR of the Center for the Development of Financial Technologies of Rosselkhozabka.

Dealers and vendors of agricultural products and equipment are moving into the category of technical marketers. As the analysis of vacancies in the specialty of a sales manager in the agro-industrial complex, posted on the Svoe Farming platform, shows, in every third announcement, employers are interested in whether candidates have work experience as a marketing analyst, sales analyst or market expert.

“If previously the role of sales professionals was limited to simple operations for the sale of equipment, seeds and fertilizers, then with the development of technology, sales success becomes more and more dependent on the ability of the candidate to train the end user to extract the maximum benefit from the purchased product or solution. These products include dashboards and dashboards, analytics systems, software alerts, robotics, sensors and cameras. Help and support from technology providers is also needed at the stage of integrating new solutions into existing agribusiness processes. Such changes lead to the fact that manufacturers of agricultural products are hiring more and more engineers, data scientists, developers every year,” says Elena Baturova.

According to forecasts of the Russian Agricultural Bank, in the next 10 years, many professions in the agro-industrial complex will require the skills to manage a fleet of robots, because automation is one of the key trends in this industry. Fully automated harvesting will become a reality in the coming years, as will autonomous control of agricultural machinery in the fields, the use of weeding robots and drones to control plant growth conditions and apply fertilizers. All this will require the industry to rethink the interaction of a person with a robot, and the process of optimizing this interaction will become a separate direction in the near future. In the perspective of 3-5 years, until digital technological platforms become completely intuitive, and robots become completely autonomous, the main emphasis will be placed on the skills of working on digital platforms and data analysis.

And this fact will be taken into account when preparing the monthly analytical report Meatinfo.ru