Bengaluru, (IANS) : Amid reports of lay-offs in the Indian IT landscape, IT professionals must go for acquiring new-age machine learning skills at a time when open source tools are now dominating the analytics landscape, a new report said on Monday.

According to a report released by Bengaluru-based analytics school Jigsaw Academy, acquiring analytics skills in the “Data Age” will boost careers for IT professionals.

“Analytics, Big Data and machine learning skills are making people stand out. It is time to pivot towards these for a future-proof career,” said Sarita Digumarti, COO and co-founder of Jigsaw Academy.

The report said that machine learning algorithms are dominating the business projects landscape. The top algorithms that organisations want people to pick up are machine learning ones.

Also, the Big Data Analytics roles have evolved and the last 18 months has seen some level of consolidation in terms of techniques and tool knowledge needed.

“The IT industry can transform itself into IT 2.0 by riding on the big data wave. But they need to move fast if they have to stay relevant,” Gaurav Vohra, CEO and Co-founder of Jigsaw Academy, said in a statement.

The report also said that the industry-wide adoption and use of open source tools shows that popularity of expensive analytics computing software is on a steady decline.