Emerging Roles in the World of IT

Ever since the dot com boom in the 1990s, technology has rapidly gone from a business tool to a bare necessity in just a decade. At the same rate of growth, the jobs your parents have in technology today are at risk of being outdated in a few years. The jobs of the future are being shaped by the emerging technologies of today.

 

Here are some of the most exciting areas for growth in the next few years and the job roles associated with them.

 

IOT Developer/Network Engineer/Hardware Engineer

 

The Internet of Things has rapidly gone from a concept to reality, with all kinds of devices, right from home lighting controls to cars, all becoming connected to the internet. With each of these devices now being able to gather sensory data, transmit it, and execute instructions, the Internet of Things is now an industry in itself. And with it will come specialized development and engineering roles. Programming hubs that talk to IOT endpoints, building networks that can connect these endpoints securely, and designing interfaces for new IOT enabled devices are some of the few examples of IOT job roles that are on the rise.

 

Data Scientist/Analyst

 

With IOT, will come an explosion of data. The data that marketing firms mine from user activity online will become a mere slice of the pie with the emergence of data flowing in from toasters in your kitchen to satellites orbiting earth. But to make sense of all of this data and to use it intelligently, data scientists and analysts will become crucial components of the technology job ecosystem.

 

DevOps

 

From security updates for your laptop to feature enhancements on your favorite apps, tech companies are releasing new code more frequently than ever. To achieve and maintain this momentum, an emerging role in the IT industry is a dedicated DevOps team that bridges the gap between development, testing, and release. Though each organization uses DevOps as needed to improve their processes, most commonly, a DevOps team keeps track of internal versioning, upgrades, code branches, etc., and take care of any operational overhead between the teams.

 

IT Architect

 

As technology requirements diversify from on-premise products to cloud services for vendors and from desktops to mobile for consumers, organizations need IT Architects who can design holistic environments for their organization’s employees to use. They are in charge of building a framework into which specific products and services can fit, so that employees can have a seamless IT experience in their day-to-day work. They need to be able to view IT solutions from a high level while still understanding the technicalities of each of the moving parts.

 

Above all else, adaptability is key to surviving the technology industry. If you can take the skills you have and apply them to an emerging technology, you will always have job security. More than job security, you can help define the future of humanity. You can do for the future what the smartphone designers did for us decades ago. You can one day tell your grandkids how you helped build an industry that took ideas from research labs and made them ubiquitous products, in a span of one lifetime.