Menial tasks rob employees of time they could spend on more productive activities. But when done right, Robotic Process Automation can oust a bucketful of mindful chores.
For instance, streamlining enterprise operations, reducing costs and freeing workers to focus on higher-value work make RPA crucial for the future of enterprise technology.
And, as the C-executive continues to consider automated solutions to make processes easier and more efficient, RPA (Robotics Process Automation) quickly turns into a strategy you can’t ignore.
Besides, businesses are switching to RPA solutions quickly to become more competitive and resilient without worrying about a significant software project or system overhaul. As a result, there is a substantial rise in the demand for RPA experts to cater for these new automated business processes and address present and future skills deficits.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t have your pick of the best. Expectations may differ from company to company, but here's a handful of best practices that are unskippable for an RPA developer and should be on your checklist before you make a hiring decision.
Here, we’ll analyze the roles, responsibilities and skills an RPA developer has. Also, we’ll discuss the accreditation needed for employing an RPA developer.
Firstly, let’s take a closer look at the main roles and responsibilities of an RPA developer and the key skills required for the job, including first-hand insights from experienced RPA developers.
Though RPA systems carry out processes independently, they still rely on highly skilled RPA Development teams for maintenance and improvisations.
Often, the main roles and responsibilities of an RPA developer are to design, develop, and integrate software robots or bots alongside humans to improve business process efficiency. Maintaining bots is also part of the job of an RPA developer.
The first phase includes the business analysis of a problem and explores the opportunities for automation solutions.
In this step, the developer analyzes the company’s business domain, identifies business-critical points, and learns what part of the flow can be automated.
When understanding the specifics of the potential automation case, an RPA developer will collect the requirements from the end users. Typically, this is done by interviewing employees to discuss the pain points and steps in task completion.
For automating the process, an RPA developer will learn the logic of the task and the actual steps needed to complete it. Then, they will document this information to collaborate with software development teams and create a bot design.
Now, let’s step toward the software development duties of an RPA developer
This needs an RPA developer to design the connected ecosystem of tools to deploy bots, track their performance, and integrate them with the company's existing technologies.
Considering the mix of business analysis and software development, RPA developers must have specific skills. So, let’s talk about them.
While programming language knowledge depends on the specific company technology stack, many other elements are considered must-haves for an RPA developer. Some of the key abilities required for this role include:
We’ve pocketed the programming languages and frameworks to work with automation bots here.
There’s no doubt that an essential aspect of designing RPA is digging into internal processes, and for this, a business analysis background is often required. Besides, this makes it a crucial factor for precisely understanding the process flows and indicating opportunities for automation.
Soft skills are unskippable for seamless communication between the end users, development teams, and other stakeholders. And, as an RPA developer acts both as a business analyst and software developer, their job eclipses an exceptional amount of communication and elaboration.
For an RPA developer, a problem-solving mindset is not just a skill written in a resume.
Indeed, RPA's core objective is to solve business problems, optimize budget, and resolve productivity concerns. So, it’s important to pay attention to candidates a business development background coupled with RPA experience.
True to any development role, this skill is vital for RPA developers. As the dominant user group for RPA is business, interface and bot training should be as intuitive as possible to ensure seamless and successful integration into the workflow.
As a key aspect of RPA activity, a comprehensive understanding of process mining is essential for most RPA-related roles.
RPA is a technology that helps automate simple processes.
But over the years, it has evolved into a new branch of technology termed Cognitive Automation. This technology is a blend of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and RPA that expands the potential of traditional bots.
Most companies embracing RPA use standard solutions from trusted RPA service providers.
As there are untold out-of-the-box solutions, hiring the right RPA developer narrows down to implementing and maintaining technologies. Nevertheless, experience with such tools is needed even for higher positions, so here’s a list of the most popular technologies:
Unquestionably, experience in data analytics is one of the attractive RPA attributes every developer should have. Moreover, it’s crucial because it plays a huge part when working with automation deployments that consist of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
Since RPA bots transform complex and unstructured data into organized and automated tasks, competency with data analytics is vital to understanding different types of variables, arrays, and dictionaries.
Simply put, an RPA developer should be able to perform operations on data sets and understand the scope of variables.
This architectural skill might need acknowledgement with process mining software, which analyses data and logs created during different processes and identifies potential bottlenecks.
In addition, the RPA developers should be capable of interviewing business-side employees to understand the specific activities they carry out that make up the more significant business process.
You don’t need to be the most adept developer to build automation; you just need to have an in-depth knowledge of XML and XSD. In addition, advanced familiarity with REST API and SoapUI is an added feather.
The integration in the RPA bot often happens on the system’s UI layer; sometimes, the need arises to send API requests. Though this rarely happens, integrations through APIs can be a crucial differentiator for a project when this situation arises.
Besides, here’s a non-RPA-specific skill often valued when hiring an RPA developer.
Nowadays, software businesses use cloud infrastructure for implementing their corporate software. Though server configuration on AWS or Azure is not RPA-specific knowledge, such experience is often needed to set up bots in the cloud.
But, before you put your finger on any RPA developer, one of the most mentioned attributes is RPA certification, which is usually provided by the leading process automation platforms.
So, let’s examine what it is and why it’s essential.
The RPA industry is becoming exceptionally popular as more companies realize the power of automation. And, with advancements in cognitive automation, the business processes that can be automated are increasing every now and then. This eventually paves the way for the growing interest in RPA technologies and hiring professionals in this domain.
As a significant part of automation is provided by RPA service providers, RPA certification is an unskippable element needed for employment.
An RPA certificate is a sign that someone has completed free or paid training on how to work with a specific RPA platform. UiPath is a significant and trusted company that provides training and certification.
Let’s look at the certification process in-depth to flesh out the types of training offered by UiPath:
UiPath is the forerunner in the field of Automation. Its courses sheath every aspect of RPA software, including business analysis aspects.
The certification process in the UiPath Academy recommends learning different parts of its platform, like the orchestrator tool, UiPath Studio, data manipulation, and many more.
These courses offer general RPA knowledge training and basic RPA infrastructure experience.
This is a learning program for junior RPA experts in any role. These consist of RPA developers, RPA architects (solution architects) and Business Analysts. The certified associates can solve simple automation tasks or even act as members of an automation team led by an Advanced RPA developer.
This is a certification for senior RPA professionals, which excavates the knowledge of the previous course. Advanced RPA developers have the potential to resolve any automation tasks and also lead the automation initiative in the company.
The course includes working with RPA platforms, developing bots, and setting up the corresponding infrastructure.
Automation Anywhere divides its courses based according to role-specific skills, recommending three types of training:
The Automation Anywhere Certification process classifies into three categories:
Blue Prism is an educational platform for RPA developers focusing on cognitive automation. The courses include the imperatives of Blue Prism platform RPA development with infrastructure management.
Now, you might ask why certification is necessary and why you should be concerned with it.
Certification is another way to validate an applicant's competence level from an employer's standpoint. These types of courses don’t cover general software development skills. Rather, they lay a firm foundation for getting RPA-specific knowledge. Even in some cases with UiPath, coding is not obligatory to create bots.
Yet, another reason RPA certification matters for the employer is the focus on a specific RPA platform.
Just as a quick rundown of the idea, such training includes an extensive knowledge base on developing RPA and designing workflows on specific platforms. So, if you plan to use UiPath as your primary automation software, you should pay attention to your partnered RPA developer certification.
In a Nutshell, the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market has heated up as enterprises increasingly look up to RPA bots to accomplish their long-term automation ambitions.
For this reason, companies are employing RPA developers. Unfortunately, though, the supply and availability of the best RPA developers don’t meet demand. So, it’s essential to consult an experienced automation service provider like YTII to hire the best RPA developers.
Basic workflow skills are an important aspect for an RPA developer.
Also, RPA developers need to create a Process Definition Document (PDD) that defines each step and produce a flowchart showing the step-by-step sequence, so documentation skills are vitally important for communicating their design to others in their team.
The 7 crucial RPA developer skills are as follows:
Identifying and designing business processes for automation is the primary role of the UiPath developer. Besides, setting up, testing, and monitoring automated workflows to ensure that business processes function at optimum efficiency without the risk of error.