How to survive in the Singapore IT job market?
How to survive in the Singapore IT job market? January 17, 2025 Faced with the impending economic outlook, how can we ensure that we can survive in the Singapore IT job market? This month, we have Jyoti Yadav, our Talent Acquistion Specialist to share with us some tips to make ourselves more employable! Step 1 – Understand the gap It is getting harder to survive in the Singapore IT job market. The gaps between the roles today and tomorrow are widening due to advancements in technology which has automated many tasks, resulting in more jobs becoming obsolete. Step 2 – Visualize opportunities By 2022, a lot of jobs will disappear, but it will create a lot of space for new jobs. Below is the snapshot of rising IT skills, divided into 4 mains categories: Continuous Integration, Automation and AI, Workflow Automation and Miscellaneous skills: From the rising skills snapshot above, we are able to predict and see which are the stable, new and redundant jobs by 2022. Step 3 – Put yourself in the company shoes Companies are on a lookout for people who are capable and bring value to them. The greater the value you bring, the higher the company is willing to pay. This is especially true when you have a skill which not a lot of people have. In order to have the best strategy to address the job market, there are 3 questions you to consider: What am I capable of doing? How can I value add to the company? How many people with the same set of skills can deliver what I’m delivering? By answering those questions, you can have a better understanding of what you can do, see where you can value add and decide your path of actions. Some best practices for you to survive! To make yourself more employable, there is a need to train and improve yourself: Training Training plan for short term goals Training plan for long term goals Implementation Real life project experience is the key to success Career Progression Lateral movement Vertical movement New client opportunities Volunteering for some projects to upgrade skills Moving forward: Stay Aware Globally, the market is set to undergo major changes in the next 3-5 years. By 2022, there will be 27% new job roles (across all industries) and 21% will be redundant roles. The new trend will not be job hopping but skills hopping as well and permanent job will be a thing of the past. Hence, there is a need for us to embark on the continuous journey of learning to stay relevant in our jobs. With this exponential growth of technologies around us, people who are really passionate will survive in the ever-changing IT market. Contact Us Now Share this page Related Articles All Posts Back Thought Leadership Humans of NITA Tech Insights Culture What It’s Like Being the First Marketing Hire at Neurones IT Asia July 23, 2025 With a digital marketing background in the bathroom ceramics and fixtures industry, Vanessa brings that experience into B2B tech—shaping marketing… Read More Daryl Shares His Journey in HR at Neurones IT Asia May 23, 2025 Daryl plays a key role in supporting HR operations at Neurones IT Asia—handling a range of employee-related matters and administrative… Read More Casey on Driving Growth with 10 years of Tech Sales Experience February 1, 2025 With over a decade of experience in tech sales, Casey brings both strategic insight and client-centric thinking to his role… Read More
Introduction to DevOps
Introduction to DevOps January 17, 2025 DevOps is the merging of the development and operations team through the usage of various tools which automate the process. It is a set of tools used at every step of a project in order to automatically build it, test it, watch it and maintain it, allowing teams to become more efficient in delivering and ensuring stable releases. Traditional Software Development Model Historically, the traditional software development model is manual and time-consuming. The planning team will ask for a feature from the development team. The development team will then deliver the feature to the Quality Assessment (QA) team. Following those rules, the QA team had to test it and certify that it was valid, before asking the operations team to push those features into production. Finally, the users and a team of internal testers will use the application in real life. If a problem arises, the planning team will have to plan a new feature or a bugfix for the problem to be solved and the loop starts again. Following this process could lead to the user waiting for days or even weeks before a feature or a bugfix could be seen in real life application. DevOps, adopted from the Agile methodology, changes the way how traditional software development model is done. Nowadays, projects involve people from each team to come together to discuss on how they can work concurrently on this project with instant feedback and inputs from various points of view. Tools for DevOps In addition, the processes are now automated with the usage of different tools for each stage. Here are some tools which are used commonly: The tools listed here are not exhaustive and some tools can serve a range of functions. The idea of DevOps is still very new to people. Like all other tools, it takes time for it to be fully understood. But once the process of understanding is done, the community will find new ways of using it. Moving forward, the next step after DevOps might be the creation of a ‘super tool’ which is able to take care of several tasks instead of having tools for each step. Contact Us Now Share this page Related Articles All Posts Back Thought Leadership Humans of NITA Tech Insights Culture What It’s Like Being the First Marketing Hire at Neurones IT Asia July 23, 2025 With a digital marketing background in the bathroom ceramics and fixtures industry, Vanessa brings that experience into B2B tech—shaping marketing… Read More Daryl Shares His Journey in HR at Neurones IT Asia May 23, 2025 Daryl plays a key role in supporting HR operations at Neurones IT Asia—handling a range of employee-related matters and administrative… Read More Casey on Driving Growth with 10 years of Tech Sales Experience February 1, 2025 With over a decade of experience in tech sales, Casey brings both strategic insight and client-centric thinking to his role… Read More
Introduction to Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing
Introduction to Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing January 17, 2025 The cyber threat landscape is ever evolving. Hence, an IT System which was delivered correctly yesterday, may not be safe today. Threats are events that exploit vulnerabilities to do harm to an organisation’s assets. To prevent these potential harm, an organisation will identify new vulnerabilities and either rectify the vulnerabilities or mitigate the risks to an acceptable level. In this article, we will be focusing on Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing. Vulnerability Assessment (VA) is to define, identify, classify and prioritise the discovery of vulnerabilities within the defined scope of the IT System(s). There are various forms of Vulnerability Assessment where tools such as scanners are used to discover vulnerabilities. The types of VA is determined by the target systems, e.g. Operating System VA is to discover any vulnerabilities through the OS layer, Network VA is to discover any vulnerabilities(including application types) through the network layer. The two most common Web-based VA are Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST). Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) is the combination of SAST and DAST. Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) How does it work? Review from inside the application such as source-code review Review from outside the application such as feeding wrong data through the web interface Review both inside and outside, whilst the developer is compiling the codes Cons Costly long duration dependent on the experience of the tester Unable to perform comprehensive application analysis since this is carried out externally More focused testing on critical systems and services Pros Able to perform comprehensive application analysis Can be done faster as compared to other types of testing due to the restricted scope Average cost and time of testing The type of VA should be determined based on the defined scope of the VAPT. For example, there’s no point doing a SAST for Commercial-Out-Of-The-Box software, but a DAST on COTS can discover new vulnerabilities. There’s no point doing Operating System VA on Network appliances, since the Network appliance OS is pre-hardened and (usually) evaluated on the Common Criteria (CC) guidelines. Minimally a Network VA should be done on an IT System, which has been wholesale migrated to a new network. The Network VA will be able to discover any misconfigured network parameters. Penetration Testing is when the discovered vulnerability cannot be rectified. The tester will try to exploit the vulnerability to determine the extent of the damage that can be done, if at all. There are 3 types of PT, described in the box below. White Box Black Box Grey Box What Tester is fully aware about the system internal workings Tester is not aware about the system internal workings Tester is partially aware about the systems internal workings How does it work? Tester is given prior knowledge on the system, and uses this information to carefully craft and exploit to discover any vulnerabilities Tester does not have any prior knowledge on the system, and have to randomly test common exploits before any discovery can be made Tester is given some prior knowledge (usually sufficient only for the defined scope of works) to test common exploits to discover any vulnerabilities Cons Costly Long duration Unable to perform comprehensive analysis More focused testing on critical components Pros Simulate an internal attack Simulate an external attack Deep but not wide discovery of vulnerabilities The difference between Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing is that the former discovers security flaws present in the organization’s system whereas the latter is used to show how damaging it can be should the vulnerabilities be exploited. “Vulnerability Assessment is mostly automatic by tools, but Penetration Testing is a hybrid of tools and manual techniques.” This VA/PT methodology is widely accepted by most security auditing firms. Almost all typical companies do not do their own VAPT but engage external auditors to execute the VA/PT. Depending upon the business objectives, different scope of the VA/PT will be planned. When a vulnerability is discovered, and it cannot be rectified, a PT is done to determine the extent of the potential damage should the vulnerability be exploited. This is the basis of the risk assessment to determine if additional security controls should be implemented. Not all vulnerabilities can be rectified. Some have no patch available as yet (e.g. zero – day), some may have no support today, (e.g. legacy products), and some may not be applicable, as determined by the PT. Contact Us Now Share this page Related Articles All Posts Back Thought Leadership Humans of NITA Tech Insights Culture What It’s Like Being the First Marketing Hire at Neurones IT Asia July 23, 2025 With a digital marketing background in the bathroom ceramics and fixtures industry, Vanessa brings that experience into B2B tech—shaping marketing… Read More Daryl Shares His Journey in HR at Neurones IT Asia May 23, 2025 Daryl plays a key role in supporting HR operations at Neurones IT Asia—handling a range of employee-related matters and administrative… Read More Casey on Driving Growth with 10 years of Tech Sales Experience February 1, 2025 With over a decade of experience in tech sales, Casey brings both strategic insight and client-centric thinking to his role… Read More
How can AI help us to invest in the stock market?
How can AI help us to invest in the stock market? January 17, 2025 Artificial Intelligence (AI) exists in our everyday lives. Examples include Siri and Alexa for simple problem solving or pure entertainment, Facebook Feed which promotes content based on your interests, and chatbots on the websites for a quick Q&A. There are two types of learning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) – supervised and unsupervised learning. “Supervised learning occurs when there is a “supervisor” to guide the machine’s learning i.e. the input and output variables are provided and mapped together. Unsupervised learning, on the other hand, is where the AI is provided information which is unsorted. “ Supervised Learning Supervised learning occurs when there is a “supervisor” to guide the machine’s learning i.e. the input and output variables are provided and mapped together. In addition, there needs to be a huge database of responses (e.g Twitter database) which already contains data to differentiate between posts which are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Supervised learning is also good in language processing as the answers are quite straightforward and the AI can easily identify the right or wrong answers. Unsupervised Learning Unsupervised learning, on the other hand, is where the AI is provided information which is unsorted. There is no “supervisor” and this AI will act on the information without guidance. Unsupervised learning is the best way for the recognition of patterns. For example, neural networks are a set of algorithms that mimic the neurons in human brains to recognize patterns. Such pattern recognition is used by the AI to learn to play games. The learning capability of the AI can be seen from the Go match of AlphaGo and Lee Sedol in March 2016, where the Google AI, AlphaGo won the match against the 18-time world champion. By giving AI games to play, it can quickly show whether the AI performs well based on the score, allowing it to improve along the way. Although it takes relatively longer than supervised learning, unsupervised learning allows the AI to generate a multitude of possibilities to solve a problem through trial-and-error, and this allows it to choose the best and most efficient way to solve a given problem. Hence, it would be more viable to use unsupervised learning for trading since there is no clear-cut right or wrong answers in trading and there are countless of possibilities and permutations in the trading market. There are two ways to analyze the trading market – Fundamental analysis and Technical analysis. We will focus on Technical analysis here. Technical Analysis Technical analysis is the idea of predicting future market prices based on the previous market patterns. An example is the simple indicator like exponential moving average (EMA) to predict future trends as shown above. Using the EMA, investors are better able to predict when is a good time to sell or buy stocks. We can buy the stocks at 2 and sell it when the price is higher at either 3 or 4. Why are we using technical analysis? This is because we can predict how people are thinking based on their behaviors from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Given the previous behaviors of people resulting in a specific pattern of market trends, it is possible for AI to make use of these available historical data to make more accurate predictions for future market prices. If reality turns out to be different, AI will be able to take this as a trial-and-error process and self-learn to make even more accurate predictions in the future. An example of a more complex indicator is the Ichimoku Cloud. Basically, the Cloud predicts the trend depending on where the position of the price is with respect to the cloud. The information on this Ichimoku Cloud reflects people’s behaviors and tells us when we should sell or buy the stocks. “Using technical analysis, we can train the AI model to use past market prices to predict the future prices and the Ichimoku Cloud more accurately by making use of a mathematical model and probabilities. ” With historical data of the trading market as a database, we input a simple mathematical function into the AI using Python. Python is a coding language which can be used for various programming purposes like web development and software development. We then allow it to process the data and let the learning take place to develop the neurons network of the AI. This is how we can make use of AI to help us invest in the stock market. Contact Us Now Share this page Related Articles All Posts Back Thought Leadership Humans of NITA Tech Insights Culture What It’s Like Being the First Marketing Hire at Neurones IT Asia July 23, 2025 With a digital marketing background in the bathroom ceramics and fixtures industry, Vanessa brings that experience into B2B tech—shaping marketing… Read More Daryl Shares His Journey in HR at Neurones IT Asia May 23, 2025 Daryl plays a key role in supporting HR operations at Neurones IT Asia—handling a range of employee-related matters and administrative… Read More Casey on Driving Growth with 10 years of Tech Sales Experience February 1, 2025 With over a decade of experience in tech sales, Casey brings both strategic insight and client-centric thinking to his role… Read More
