Before you dive in – are you looking for more information about what RPA is and how it can benefit your organization? Click here first.
RPA Developer Responsibilities
While RPA developer is an evolving and recently created position, early attempts to define it have come up with a fairly concise set of responsibilities:
Design, development, implementation, and quality assurance of RPA systems and workflows.
The scope of your tasks and responsibilities will vary greatly from organization to organization.
You may work with sales teams, business analysts, and the clients themselves in order to get a clear picture of the system that needs automated. Many organizations will have dedicated design teams that perform requirements gathering to architect the RPA systems, and QA teams to ensure their success. Smaller organizations will require your more direct input across the full range of responsibilities. These requirements will not be consistent from organization to organization.
RPA Developer Tasks
Design
RPA developers gather and review requirements from clients and architect an RPA system that achieves their goals. This will also involve determining how to bridge the gap between systems and determining what technology will be necessary depending on the scope of automation needed.
Development
After the workflow has been architected and signed off on, RPA Developers are tasked with the actual programming of all bots and necessary development to accomplish the goals of the workflow.
Implementation
RPA developers are in charge of setting the robots up and making the handoff. When the workflow is complete, RPA developers often work with clients IT teams or directly with employees so that they can understand how the robots work and how they are controlled.
Quality Assurance
RPA developers are are responsible for testing and retesting functionality until the workflow performs exactly as expected. They should be intimately familiar with all aspects of the workflow and be able to evaluate its performance in a testing environment to ensure that all individual requirements are met.
Technical Background
RPA developers should have extensive IT and process knowledge. Understanding basic development frameworks like Agile, lean, or waterfall will help you analyze and develop for organizations with different management philosophies. RPA will require you to work across a wide variety of systems and tools, your IT knowledge will be immensely valuable here. The more platforms you demonstrate proficiency in, the more value you can bring to projects for a wider range of clients.
What technical skills should you have?
Despite RPA developers focusing on major tools like UiPath, AutomationAnywhere, and BluePrism – all which require little to no code to operate, an expert programming background is a huge factor in success as a RPA developer.
- Experience with: .NET, Java, C#/C++
Most RPA implementations are built on the .NET framework. - Competency in at least one scripting language is expected for most positions - typically JavaScript.
- Database experience: SQL
What other skills should you have?
- Experience with complicated workflows
- Attention to detail
- Communication skills
- Ability to present technical details
- Familiarity with OCR tools
- Familiarity with any of the popular RPA tools listed below
Popular Tools
- Blue Prism
- UiPath
- Automation Anywhere
- Pega
- Context
- Jacada
- WinAutomation
- NICE Systems
Should you get an RPA Certification?
We think they provide immense value – so much so that we wrote a whole blog post about it. Check it out!
Wrapping it up
As RPA evolves, so will the requirements to be an RPA developer. AI and machine learning have already begun to become an increasingly large component of RPA software, so it’s a safe bet that that knowledge will be valuable if not expected in the future. Being an RPA developer is about understand how to use a wide variety of technologies and construct workflows that bridge the gap between them, helping organizations free up high value employees from low value tasks and helping drive more value for their organization and their customers. Any skills – technical or otherwise, that will help organizations achieve that goal will continue to be highly valued for all RPA developers. It’s up to you to continually learn and ensure that you’re bringing the most value to the table.
Interested in working with fivestar*?
If you decide that it is valuable and profitable for your business to have custom software, fivestar* can develop solutions that centralize workflows, optimize processes, and enable decision-making through real-time data and business intelligence.
About the Author: Cameron Avrigean
Cameron Avrigean is a Marketing Coordinator at fivestar*. Cameron is an analytics fanatic with a penchant for copywriting and social media. He works with the marketing team to create engaging content, and is looking for the next big thing. Cameron holds a B.S. in Business Management from Point Park University.