A 2020 US Emerging Jobs report by LinkedIn provides interesting news in the Robotics Engineering sector: “Careers in Robotics Engineering can vary greatly between software and hardware roles, and our data shows engineers working on both virtual and physical bots are on the rise.” While hardware robots remain in the realm of investment-heavy manufacturing, software robots became increasingly popular in office work due to the rise of Robotic Process Automation or RPA. As one of the fastest-growing industries according to Gartner, RPA led to the emergence of new professions. One of them is the RPA developer. Given a growing interest in automation engineering, let’s take a look at the role of an RPA developer. In this article, we’ll analyze the typical duties, responsibilities, and skills this role has. Further, we’ll also discuss the certification required for employing or hiring an RPA developer.
What is Robotic Process Automation in a nutshell
To understand the role of an RPA developer, first, let’s provide you with some context on what RPA is. Robotic Process Automation is a practice of employing software bots designed to do routine business tasks. Data transmission or transaction approval are some of the most typical cases for RPA automation.RPA in a nutshell When a sequence of actions has a straightforward flow, like “download document >> change formatting >> upload to a destination folder,” we can apply an RPA bot to this process. The program memorizes the process steps and reproduces them over and over. And, mostly, these bots are designed for business users, so they don’t require any programming language to operate. This is what RPA looks like in a nutshell. For a more in-depth look, check our articles on different aspects of this technology: Robotic Process Automation technology overview RPA tools implementation How AI is applied in Robotic Process Automation Now, let’s move on to an RPA developer.
What is RPA Developer
An RPA Developer is a software team role that focuses on designing those automation bots. While the name includes the word “developer,” typical tasks don't match a typical software engineering routine, because an RPA developer uses the skills of a software developer, a business analyst, and a project manager. RPA bots can be used on a large scale and automate thousands of processes at once. So, whenever we have more than ten bots, the technology starts to expand with its own servers, monitoring tools, and operation dashboards. Depending on their experience level, an RPA developer will be responsible for programming the actual bots or designing the ecosystem for automation tools. The degree of management and architectural responsibilities will depend on the company’s priorities and RPA team size. So, let’s have a look at the main RPA developer responsibilities to appreciate the full spectrum of their duties.RPA developer responsibilities
The responsibilities can be split into phases of RPA development. The first phase includes the business analysis of a problem and the design of automation solutions. The second covers tasks on coding, testing, and maintaining both RPA bots and the entire ecosystem. Let’s explore each of the stages in detail.RPA developer workflow split by business analysis activities, bot development, and overall ecosystem design
Business analysis duties
Problem identification. An RPA developer is in charge of exploring the opportunities for automation. Their responsibility is to reveal business processes that can be partially or fully automated with software to remove the manual burden and improve productivity. So, this will include analyzing the company's business domain, finding business-critical points, and learning what part of the flow can be automated. Requirements gathering. When learning the specifics of the potential automation case, an RPA developer will gather the requirements from the end users. This is typically done via interviewing employees to reveal the pain points and steps in task completion. Exploring off-the-shelf RPA systems. The RPA industry is highly developed and already has thousands of business processes covered out of the box. So, there might be no need to develop custom software to handle your business task. In this case, an RPA developer will be responsible for searching for an RPA solution and exploring whether this specific bot fits the business task. Documenting business process steps. To automate the process, an RPA developer will learn the logic of the task and the actual steps it takes for an employee to complete it. They document this information to do more work with software development teams and create a bot design. This set of responsibilities will be found in the majority of RPA vacancies. Most businesses need help with understanding the right fit for RPA software and want to find out if there is even a need for automation. Now, let’s move on to the software development duties.RPA development responsibilities
As we mentioned before, RPA software is often used on a large scale. This requires an RPA developer to design the corresponding ecosystem of tools to deploy bots, monitor their performance, and integrate them with the rest of the company’s technologies. So, as a software engineer, this role entails several responsibilities: Process mining. Process mining is the practice of monitoring corporate processes using data. This technique was developed to optimize the implementation of RPA, as business processes are often interconnected and may complement one another. RPA developers often use process mining to build a strategy of automation and explore the most optimal implementation tactics. Data management. A complementary part of process mining is data management. As the majority of business processes deal with data extraction, editing, and formatting, an RPA developer should understand how data changes. Any RPA system suggests its own methods on how to extract and label data from various sources. This aspect basically includes the following operations:- data extraction methods,
- data cleaning,
- verification process,
- formatting, and
- data output configuration.
RPA bot flow control
Source: UIPath RPA bot development. This part includes designing and coding automation software for the documented business tasks. Some providers implement tools for visual scripting. This is basically a possibility for nontechnical users to create RPA bots without code knowledge. The user interface provides a drag-and-drop interface with in-built commands to design a flowchart the bot will operate on. Testing and troubleshooting. As a part of quality control, RPA developers are responsible for keeping the bots afloat, finding, and solving code issues. Designing an RPA ecosystem. An RPA system includes different tools either to provide a user with control over bots or administrate the digital workforce from a dedicated interface. An RPA developer is in charge of designing the ecosystem of tools, which often will include the following components:
- user interface – a desktop or web application that allows a business user to launch or stop the bot, modify its workflow, provide training, new rules, and other functionality;
- orchestration – an administrative dashboard for controlling multiple bots, monitoring performance and metrics, as orchestrators allow for modifying the bot workflow on a large scale and assign different tasks to separate groups of bots;
- training interface – for creating RPA bots to perform specific business tasks, for the most part a software that is an integrated module in a user interface or an orchestrator; and
- a physical or virtual server to deploy RPA software.
RPA developer skills
While the knowledge of programming languages depends on the specific company tech stack, there are several things considered as must-haves for an RPA developer. Scanning through company vacancies, we can point out the following skills required most often. Analytical skills. As a significant part of the job is bound to digging into internal processes, a business analysis background is generally required. This is vital for the correct understanding of the process flows and indicating opportunities for automation. Problem solving. This is the case where problem solving is not just an item on a resume. Because RPA is designed to solve business problems, optimize budgeting, and resolve productivity issues. So you might pay attention to the candidates that have a business development background, coupled with RPA experience. Strong communication skills. Soft skills are required to efficiently communicate between the end users, development teams, and other stakeholders. As an RPA developer acts both as a business analyst and software developer (or lead), their job entails significant amounts of communication and elaboration. Understanding UX principles. Valid for any development role, this skill is very much required for RPA software. As the primary user group is business- not tech-related, interface and bot training should be as intuitive as possible to ensure successful integration into the workflow. Process mining proficiency. As a specific part of RPA activity, a strong understanding of process mining is required for most RPA-related roles. Programming language experience. Here, we’ll group the programming languages and frameworks that are often required to work with automation bots.- Python is the most demanded scripting language for RPA, as various bots use scripts written on Python and some of its libraries.
- Visual basic, while considered a popular language for RPA on its own, some major vendors like Automation Anywhere and UIPath use VB as their main language.
- C/C# are another common group of languages for building desktop RPA software.
- .NET/ASP.NET are the frameworks for the C group of languages and Visual Basic. .NET is a platform of frameworks that allows for building both web and desktop cross-platform applications, and it’s a popular choice for writing RPA software on C/C#.
- JavaScript is often required for building web-based RPA. And it's also required for working with the Automation Anywhere ecosystem along with Visual Basic.
What is RPA certification
The RPA industry is becoming more popular as companies realize the power of automation. With the advances in cognitive automation, the range of business processes that can be automated gets even wider. This leads to the growing interest in RPA technologies and hiring professionals in this sphere. As a large part of automation systems provided by RPA vendors, RPA certification is often required for employment. A certificate is an indicator that someone has completed free or paid training on how to work with a specific RPA platform. There are three major companies that provide training and certification:- UiPath,
- Blue Prism, and
- Automation Anywhere.
UIPath certification
UiPath is the biggest educator in the field of RPA. Its courses cover every component of RPA software but also touch on the business analysis aspects.A UIPath digital certificate
Source: forum.uipath.com The process of certification in the UiPath Academy suggests learning different parts of its platform like UiPath studio, orchestrator tool, data manipulation, etc. These courses provide training for general RPA knowledge and basic experience with RPA infrastructure. UiPath Certification is divided into two categories:
- UiPath Certified RPA Associate (UiRPA) is a learning program for junior RPA specialists in any role. These include RPA developers, RPA architects, or Solution Architects, and Business Analysts. Certified associates can solve rather simple automation tasks or act as members of an automation team led by an Advanced RPA Developer.
- UiPath Certified Advanced RPA Developer (UiARD) is a certification for senior RPA experts, which deepens the knowledge of the previous course. Advanced RPA developers are capable of both solving any automation tasks and leading the automation initiative in the company.
Automation Anywhere certification
Automation Anywhere splits its courses into role-specific skills, suggesting three types of training:- Citizen Developer. A course to get familiar with the Automation Anywhere platform and RPA basics, this course includes theoretical knowledge on automation case identification and practical knowledge on how to build basic bots.
- Bot Developer. This is an in-depth course on RPA software development, training, deployment, and maintenance.
- Business Analyst. This is a course that teaches the specifics of business analysis for RPA, automation case identification, RPA strategy, and process mining.