More than 60% of professionals spend over 30% of their time doing repetitive, administrative tasks that are a drain on their productivity, according to a Mckinsey report. Ultimately, these boring, mundane tasks can be automated. 

Robotic Process Automation (RPA), an emerging technology, is a way to streamline those tasks enabling employees to do more impactful work while allowing organizations to operate more efficiently and cost-effectively.

If you’re interested in learning this new technology and making an impact in your career through automation and digital transformation then enroll in our all-new RPA Developer Nanodegree program today. This Nanodegree program has been developed in collaboration with UiPath.

We’re proud to partner with UiPath for this program as they are a leading enterprise RPA software company and the fastest-growing technology company in North America in 2019.

“RPA is the next big opportunity that companies want to seize, and there’s a need for RPA developers who possess the skills to drive that opportunity forward,” said Gabe Dalporto, CEO, Udacity. “RPA is an extraordinary technology that is architected to reduce the burden of repetitive, simple tasks on employees, freeing up their time to focus on more substantive projects. Through our RPA Developer Nanodegree program, we’re empowering developers and engineers to strengthen their career paths and helping employers focus their teams to put their effort where it really matters.”

“AI and automation will create millions of new jobs in the near future,” said Alok Shrivastava, UiPath Vice President of Learning Alliances. “We built UiPath on the promise to democratize RPA and train a global community of practitioners. Partnering with Udacity to develop the RPA Developer Nanodegree program furthers our commitment to empowering people with the in-demand automation skills to succeed in newly emerging careers and remain competitive in their current roles.”

What is RPA?

Robotic process automation occurs when basic tasks are automated through software systems that function across a variety of applications. 

What’s more, RPA is quickly becoming widely adopted and several industries such as healthcare, finance, management consulting, telecommunications and more, are using this technology to become more efficient. A recent report from Information Services Group Inc. (ISG) states that around 92% of companies aim to adopt RPA by 2020 in order to increase operational efficiencies.

The software or “bot” can be taught a workflow with multiple steps and applications, such as taking received forms, sending a receipt message, checking the form for completeness, filing the form in a folder and updating a spreadsheet with the name of the form, the date filed, and so on. RPA software is designed to reduce the burden of repetitive, simple tasks on employees.

This is the reason why industry experts from companies like PwC, Spotify, UiPath and others recommended RPA at the RPA Insiders Virtual Conference organized by Udacity and UiPath. 

They discussed how RPA is almost becoming imperative for global companies. The experts concluded that RPA is valuable technology that will help support the workforce — not supplant it. Here’s how businesses can benefit from implementing RPA in their organization:

  1. Cost effectiveness, by automation you can save upto 30% of your cost
  2. Increased customer satisfaction, by freeing up of employees for more front line work
  3. Higher operational efficiency, by reducing errors thereby offering lower operational risks
  4. Improved internal processes, due to defined governance structure
  5. Fits in just like a human, no need to replace existing systems to implement RPA as it adapts to the existing system just like a human

How You Can Become an RPA Developer

According to MarketWatch, the global Robotic Process Automation Market is valued at $1.609 billion in 2019 and expected to reach $11.59 billion by 2026 with a cumulative annual growth rate of 32.58% over the forecast period.

RPA is going to be the future for most organizations. This will open up career opportunities for many. Making this is the right time to upskill yourself in the field to take advantage of this emerging job market.

Our RPA Developer Nanodegree program prepares students with comprehensive knowledge and professional-level skills they need to develop and deploy business process automations. 

The course assumes no prior knowledge of RPA. It begins by introducing basic RPA concepts, the UiPath RPA platform, and then teaches a student how to use free UiPath software to automate business processes while refreshing basic programming skills along the way. This program is ideal if you want to be an RPA developer.

Get Hands-on Experience with Robotics Process Automation (RPA)

Designed by industry leaders, the program offers hands-on skill building in the topic. The three real-life projects and a capstone project make this Nanodegree program a complete guide to get job-ready in the field of RPA.

PROJECT 1: Sorting Annual Reports

You will be given a webpage where all your company’s annual reports are currently stored and will create an automation to sort them based on the name of the reports. 

By passing this project, you’ll demonstrate a proven ability to use UiPath Studio to develop an automation solution that executes several actions across multiple applications.

PROJECT 2: Invoice Scraping

In this project, you will develop an automation for a process that will scrape data from and then process invoices. 

Your robot will read through emails and download the invoices received in the form of an email attachment. It will extract specific data and store those values in an Excel spreadsheet and a subset of values will be uploaded to the Orchestrator Queue.  Finally, the robot will email the spreadsheet to you when finished.

PROJECT 3: RPA Code Review

As an RPA developer, you will often be called on by other RPA developers on your team to review their work. Team members review each other’s code routinely before completing the end-to-end automation solution. 

It is the job of an RPA developer leading a project, to finish the Development Specifications Document when the development and testing is done for hand-off to the digital centers of excellence (CoE) team.

CAPSTONE PROJECT: Personal Use Automation

You will apply the skills you have developed throughout this RPA Developer Nanodegree to build an automation of a process in your professional or personal life. 

To ensure your process is impactful and a good use case for your portfolio, it will have to be a process that interacts with multiple applications, contains data manipulation, handles errors and exceptions, and has good design and reusable components. 

First, you will fill out all the necessary steps of the process and any requirements in the Process Definition Document (PDD). Then, you will design and build the automated solution in UiPath Studio. Finally, you will create the resulting Development Specifications Document (DSD) showcasing your solution and any dependencies needed to run it. 

This project will let you get accustomed to the entire process of RPA — from planning to deployment.

Create Your Career Prospects In RPA Development

RPA is a growing career field right now with many organizations trying to ride the digital transformation and automation wave. 

And, with COVID19 forcing many organizations to accelerate their automation journey, this skill-set is going to emerge as one of the most sought after in the job-market.

With more than 5 million RPA related jobs available right now, there are many job roles that you can consider:

  • RPA Developer
  • RPA Project Manager
  • Solution Architect
  • Business Analyst
  • Associate
  • Process Consultant

Start Learning. Enroll Now!

If you want to learn more about this transformative technology and want to lead the development and implementation of this technology in your organization, then check out our RPA Developer Nanodegree program.

Start Learning

Alper Tekin
Alper Tekin
Alper Tekin is the Chief Product Officer at Udacity. He was Udacity’s first international hire, founded the company’s EMEA presence as the Regional Director of EMEA, and later founded Udacity Enterprise, Udacity's B2B division targeting business customers. Prior to joining Udacity in 2015, Alper was a serial entrepreneur in Europe, acting as founder & CEO of several startups, including AlfaPeople, Mekanist.net, and BlaBlaCar TR.