New age career opportunities in Information Technology after graduation

IT boom is almost over now. Gone are the days when anyone knowing only technologies like Java, JSP, Servlet etc could have easily landed a job. Data is growing fast with companies like Facebook,LinkedIn,Twitter and competition between the companies is getting tough day by day. Today, companies focus on user experience and personalization and therefore, the need to harness this vast data is more important than ever. Now how this is translated to the newer career opportunities for graduates who have just graduated. 

1. Big Data

Data is growing at a rapid pace (doubling in every two years). Every year, we perform 1.2 trillion searches. Facebook users send on an average 30+ million messages every minute. Since data is growing at fast rate, it arises need to store and process the data. There are many technologies like Hadoop,Hive, MongoDB, Couchbase, Spark etc which allows user to store tons of data. This is one of the area which started growing in last couple of years and will also be in demand for next few years. Big data is used in different industries like eCommerce (personalization,storage),media (displaying relevant ads), banking etc. 

2. Analytics

Considering data growth, we require to focus beyond only storing the data. To make relevant decisions from this data, it need to be processed and analyzed. Just about 0.5% of all data is currently analyzed. This is where Analytics comes into picture. It allows business user to make use of processed data, enabling them to make decisions on its merit. R language etc are getting popular and new languages are also coming for Analytics. There are good opportunities for data scientist who can extract information from structure (data stored in relational databases like oracle)/unstructured data (data stored using Big Data technologies like HDFS-Hadoop Distributed File System).

3. User Experience( UX)

Since there are lot of companies in the market competing in any industry and targeting similar audience, it comes down to the user experience. Ux mean a person's entire experience using a particular product, system or service. It involves deep understanding of user profile like who they are, what they need etc. One example of good user experience in eCommerce industry is guest checkout allowing user to complete the checkout without requiring them to register first. Other examples are displaying rating and reviews, displaying call to action etc. This kind of work gives tremendous opportunities for people skilled in User experience. 

4. Mobile

With smartphones and data plans getting cheaper, usage of smartphone is increasing throughout the world. Most of smartphone are on iOS or Android and have mobile apps for various purposes. Again, this is one of the area where young graduates can get skilled by learning Android(java based) and iOS technologies(objective C) and find suitable, exciting  work opportunities. 

5. Automated testing

As we are building millions of websites and apps, they need to be tested to make sure that they work as per the requirements. Testing all these sites manually would require tremendous effort and will be prone to errors. Hence there is demand for automated testing professionals. There are many open source (e.g. jMeter, Selenium) and proprietary tools like Load Runner which are used across lot of companies.

6. IoT (Internet of things)

IoT is network of different type of physical devices, vehicles, machines and other items. It allows objects to be sensed, connected and accessed remotely. As per wikipedia, IoT will consist of almost 50 billion objects by 2020. One of the interesting example of usage of IoT could be a car equipped with sensors that can notification to the owner if someone hit the car (on road or in parking). Sounds interesting?

Another example could be in agriculture. World population is expected to grow by 70% by 2050, while agriculture output has to increase with limited amount of water and land. IoT applications can help by placing sensors in the field which will detect soil moisture, crop growth and livestock feed levels, remotely manage and control using smart connected combines and irrigation equipment’s. There could be a field having sensors and those sensors send a notification or drainage valves could open or close automatically if ground water level is insufficient or notifying grower (farmer) if pest spreads in the field. 

With such expansive applications across all spheres of life, IoT is set for a major boom and will create huge job opportunities. As a professional, you will need a broad range of engineering and software skills, able to write apps in the cloud and also to come up with new services, databases and user-interfaces