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RPA Consultant : Job Description

Use our template to create a compelling and comprehensive RPA Consultant job description to attract top talent.

A booming technology, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) promotes productivity gains through the automation of business processes. The key: eliminating tedious tasks, streamlining operations and reducing costs. In this job description, you’ll learn about the missions, salary and skills of the RPA Consultant. A highly sought-after profile in today’s business world, particularly in digital services companies.


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What is the role of the RPA Consultant?

Their role is to support the technical design of the automation of business processes in its entirety.

Definition of the RPA strategy

The first part of an RPA Consultant’s job is to define the automation strategy in close collaboration with the client or the IT department, adopting a robotic worksite planning approach. This first step involves a diagnostic to identify possible robotisation options as well as a POC (proof of concept).

Automation process implementation

Once the strategy is defined, the RPA Consultant begins configuring the tools and deploying all of the automation for each process. The key here is to work to develop new rules while respecting the constraints defined by the RPA protocol.

Tests and presentation of the robots to the teams

Finally, the RPA Consultant takes care of the unit tests and validates the functional specifications put in place. They also participate in the development of the user manual for the operational implementation of the robots and the presentation of the robots to the company’s teams.


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Required skills of the RPA Consultant

RPA Consultant Skills

Strong knowledge of software security

With an IT background, the RPA Consultant has an appetite for information systems and automation and/or robotisation. They are masters of tools such as RPA UI Path, Pega or Blue Prism.

Mastery of Agile methods

The profession of RPA Consultant requires you to know agile project management methods (Scrum, Kaban) & Cycle in V. This method recommends setting short-term objectives, dividing the project into several sub-projects. Once the first goal is reached, the team moves on to the next until the end goal is achieved. This is an agile way of working.

Rigour and curiosity

Rigour and curiosity are essential qualities for an RPA Consultant. As an expert, they must be able to use tools and working methodologies that allow them to track the progress of projects in a meticulous manner. They must also show great curiosity to constantly update their knowledge and skills.

Within the industry

RPA consultant, context

Certainly, the consultant is an expert who can be found in all type of modern companies. However, it is a position that makes more sense for digital services companies and other big organisations with lots of time-consuming processes that can be easily automated. Think of insurance or book-keeping companies.

Salary of the RPA Consultant

RPA Consultant Salary

The average daily rate ranges between €400 and €800.


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Training of the RPA Consultant

RPA Consultant education

In conclusion, a college degree in IT can be an excellent steppingstone to this technical position. However, it is advisable to complement that degree with dedicated licenses and certifications. An advanced degree in AI and Machine Learning can help a great deal.


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IT Decision-makers Tips & errors to avoid

The Case for Automation in Software Development

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has made great strides in the enterprise world over the past few years. According to Gartner’s most recent study on the topic,  90% of robotic process automation (RPA) vendors will offer generative-AI-assisted automation by 2025. The rapid growth of automation (and here the case of automation in software development) is not only prompting significant media buzz around its promising capabilities, but also raising concerns about its long-term impact on overall employment.


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AI in the workplace: productivity gains and fears of trust

Surely, companies are increasingly relying on virtual employees — from chatbots to AI-powered personal assistants — to increase productivity and lessen the burden imposed on staff by time-consuming and repetitive tasks better left to machine learning algorithms. However, as it tends to be the case with artificial intelligence, there exists a generalised mistrust of synthetic agents and their overblown potential to replace humans.

As we have mentioned in the past, we should look at new technological developments from a more practical perspective rather than from a position of worry. Automation and artificial intelligence are tools that we can leverage to enhance the quality and speed of our work.

Embedded in the DevOps DNA

This is particularly true in a discipline like software engineering, which requires the full power of human ingenuity while also encompassing a series of tasks that burn through a lot of time and resources. Not surprisingly, automation is deeply ingrained within agile development methodologies and represents a big part of the day-to-day in DevOps.

In their effort to optimise software production pipelines, DevOps engineers take advantage of various automation tools that allow for faster, more robust development – although how much automation should exactly be involved in the process remains a cause of debate.

In any case, benefits of automation in software development are too great to ignore: speed, more resources and increased quality and security.   

Increased resource availability

Firstly, the continuous improvement and delivery (CI/CD) paradigm is an intensive process that involves many steps and requires increased collaboration between teams. Accordingly, automation has a great role to play to help with code testing, the updating of repositories and the integration of various software components.

Moreover, automation offers a possible solution for understaffed teams of developers. Skill and personnel shortages are a prevailing issue for the industry. Development teams can greatly benefit from eager bots and other automation tools tackling all those lower-level, time-consuming tasks.                                

Maintaining quality and app security together with speed

Given today’s accelerated and competitive product lifecycle and the need for companies to adapt to ever-changing markets, speed is key in the delivery of software solutions. However, it is hard to achieve optimum levels of speeds while preserving code integrity and ensuring security across your universe of solutions.  

Automation not only helps ensure the production of robust and quality code with fewer resources — it also leads to greater security standards by allowing developers to continuously monitor for vulnerabilities while maintaining the focus on higher-level aspects of software creation.

In fact, a recent report by Ponemon Institute and IBM revealed that organizations without security automation experienced in 2019 breach costs that were 95% higher than those companies with fully-deployed automation ($5.16 million average total cost of a breach without automation vs. $2.65 million for fully-deployed automation).


AI fuels innovation in business, but a shortage of qualified talent hampers its widespread adoption. To overcome the AI talent gap and gain a competitive edge, companies need effective strategies. Explore our infographic for the top 5 strategies to build a strong AI team.


Conclusion

This data underscores the ongoing significance of security automation in the contemporary cybersecurity landscape. As organizations grapple with evolving cyber threats and vulnerabilities, the adoption of automated security measures emerges as a key strategy for not only enhancing overall cybersecurity posture but also for minimizing the financial impact associated with data breaches. Therefore, as we progress into 2023, these insights serve as a compelling reminder for businesses to prioritize and invest in advanced security automation solutions to safeguard their digital assets and maintain resilience in the face of evolving cyber risks.

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IT Decision-makers Tips & errors to avoid

5 experts to hire to strengthen an IT team

Beyond your department’s immediate needs, it is important that you keep in mind the mid- and long-term needs of your company. As your organization’s IT leader, you must ensure that you’re building a team capable of staying aligned with the technology and business trends that are most likely to emerge in the following years. That means not only promoting continuous education among your already existing team, but also looking for new talent that will bring in those skills and ways of thinking that will future-proof it. It’s often hard to identify the right candidate or profile in all the clutter, so we at Mindquest have prepared a shortlist of experts to hire to and incorporate to strengthen an IT team if you haven’t done so yet.


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The top 5 experts to hire to strengthen an IT team

A business-savvy data scientist

First of the experts to hire to strengthen an IT team: the data scientist. It’s no secret that a solid data strategy is one of the key components of any respectable CIO’s digital transformation plan. Organisations all over the globe are ramping up their efforts to leverage their data in deeper, more impactful ways, from business intelligence to predictive and prescriptive analytics.

It is no surprise, then, that the data scientist role was in the top 5 of LinkedIn’s latest emerging jobs study. According to the company, data scientist jobs have experienced a 37% hiring growth over the past three years.

The key skills you should also look for when hiring a good data scientist include machine learning. Also data science, Python, R and Apache Spark. However, as data analysis and predictive analytics are increasingly being incorporated into the decision-making process of companies, there is a growing need for data scientists themselves to understand the business.

A business-savvy data scientist eliminates the need for a middleman to translate data insights into business advice and transformation. Furthermore, as someone who can see both sides of the story, they can use data in more efficient and business-critical ways.

If you don’t have such a profile in your team, consider adding it.   


Also read our article: HR Managers: How to Assess the Technical Skills of IT Candidates


A true AI specialist

Often, data scientists are the ones taking over AI and machine learning duties within IT departments. Or at least being one of the main components of the AI team. That’s fine. A data scientist can, of course, become an expert in Ai through training and experience, but it’s not always the case. A true AI expert goes a bit further than the traditional data scientist, having mastered skills such as deep learning and natural language processing.

According to the same LinkedIn report, the AI specialist role has experienced a 74% hiring growth in the last 4 years. That is because hiring a true expert in AI can result in great benefits across several departments and processes within the organisation. AI can optimize operations, help with cybersecurity, come up with valuable customer insights and help you communicate better with your stakeholders by eliminating the lower levels of customer service. But it can do much more. If you have yet to explore this area, we recommend that you do.

A cloud cybersecurity expert

For some time, IT leaders were after all-terrain cybersecurity experts that understood the company’s whole IT ecosystem and could deal with a wide array of cyber threats and vulnerabilities. Then, as the digital environment has grown more complex and cyber-attacks more sophisticated, that figure is no longer the ideal gatekeeper. As it happens with everything else in our economy, specialization is key.

Then, with more and more companies moving their business-critical operations to the cloud ­­ —and with hybrid, public and private cloud models becoming more intertwined— attacks via cloud infrastructure are poised to hit a new high this year. Therefore, it is of vital importance that you look into hiring a cybersecurity expert that is exclusively dedicated to protecting your cloud real estate.


Also read ou discover our interview: Cybersecurity Career Tips From a Ballerina Turned Pentester


A DevOps engineer

Moreover, a DevOps engineer is a team addition you should consider if you’re looking to optimize and speed up the software development lifecycle. With a silo-breaking mentality, DevOps engineers work to get different IT teams and processes integrated and create a workflow that’s beneficial for everybody.

They achieve so by using their deep understanding of automation tools to develop digital pipelines comprising all stages in the production cycle — From concept and testing to deployment and monitoring.

Their wholistic mindset also makes them great evangelists of DevOps philosophy across your whole team. Greater awareness of process integration and collaboration across teams can only be beneficial for everyone in the longer run.  


Interested in DevOps profiles? Read about this expert’s DevOps career story.


An RPA automation engineer

Not to be confused with the kind of automation implemented by a DevOps specialist, RPA automation deals with processes internal to the IT team, like ticket generation, and to the overall company. An RPA expert can be of tremendous help anywhere where time-consuming, repetitive tasks can be automated.

In conclusion, think of all the time you could save across your organization by hiring an automation engineer that would lighten your employee’s workload so that they could dedicate themselves to more productive tasks. Definitely worth it.