If you’re someone who has worked in IT for some time or is pondering on a career in IT, then IoT must have been one of the possible specializations that you have thought about. However, unlike the lots of other specialization like System Administrators, that have been in IT since time immemorial, IoT is a relatively burgeoning field.
In spite of its relatively short period of existence, IoT has proliferated through most enterprise solutions, with more than 29% of industries employing IoT in some form or the other with another 64% looking to get onboard in the next one year. With so many manufacturers looking to make the switch, the demand for people who are well versed in all things IoT and Cloud are at an all time high.
However, as easy as it might seem at first glance, developing or managing an IoT system is far more difficult than a desk based IoT job. We discuss the ins and outs of this challenging new role in IT in our next segment.
The 3 Ways To Prepare Yourself For a Job in IoT
A recent job survey by a US-based company, Burning Glass, found out some interesting stats. Out of more than 800,000 job listings in the US, only a mere 1000 were for IoT only. So where are the jobs in IoT going to? Well according to a recent report by Technalysis Research, 44% of the people currently dedicating more than half their time on IoT were from the IT department. So what were the skills that these men were expected to pick up on?
#1. Management Skills
One of the most important skills that working in IoT demands is not at all a technical skill in the strictest sense of the term. This is because IoT is more of a marriage between IT and OT and while these two bodies have kept separate for the longest times, with the advent of IoT we find that people from both sides of the pond have to talk and interact with each other.
When the sensors and smart hubs meet the workers and moving parts of the real world, having the managerial skills to work with people possessing different skill sets and the ability to make friends comes to the forefront in a much bigger way.
#2. Machine Languages
Most people in the IT departments have spent much of their time working on higher level systems and languages such as JAVA and C#. While these are important skill sets to have as well, they’re not vital to understanding how the IoT devices work on a basic level. In order to get a thorough understanding of IoT devices, having a good grasp on Machine Learning is imperative.
#3. Cloud Computing
Another important piece of the puzzle is cloud computing as most IoT solutions come with a cloud-based analytics platform. As a result, for anyone to develop on the IoT platform having a thorough understanding of Cloud Computing and resource allocation becomes absolutely vital.
“There will certainly be some new job titles and new roles, but we will probably also see a lot of expansion of existing roles and responsibilities.”
Said Tim Herbert, senior VP for research and market intelligence at the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), an IT industry group.
As we are at a very early stage of development for IoT, it makes sense that someone looking to make a career out of it will have to learn a lot of things on the go and experiment and develop new solutions on the fly. In the coming years as we head to 28 billion connected devices in 2020, we expect that IoT will become a regular curriculum, in Universities across the world.