Credit: zfootage via YouTube When CompTIA conducted an intensive examination of the IT employment market last year, it uncovered demand for jobs whose titles would have been meaningless only a year or two ago: augmented reality designer, Internet of things architect, container developers.
That’s no surprise, given that the IT job market is in constant flux, with new technologies emerging so quickly that hiring managers struggle to define those positions — let alone give them a title. IBM, for example, has a director of blockchains, and Ford Motor is among many companies looking for GPU cluster engineers. [ Find out how to handle the real-world problems faced by developers, with InfoWorld’s professional programmer’s business survival guide . | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld’s Application Development newsletter . ] Surely, some emerging fields will falter. Others, however, will grow to become the next big thing. When InfoWorld looked at emerging jobs in 2011 , No. 2 on the list was data scientist. Now a quick search on Dice.com, a large tech-focused job board, returns screen after screen of hits; it’s in the mainstream. This trend toward extracting business value from large data sets has spawned demand for new skills and spun off emerging areas of opportunities for IT pros willing to learn those skills.
At the same time, traditional IT jobs are morphing, requiring new abilities, says Tim Herbert, senior vice president and researcher at CompTIA. Network admins, for example, must learn cloud skills, and security specialists are using machine learning to defend their networks.
Among the technologies that could fuel a new IT career revolution are IBM’s Watson and similar cognitive computing initiatives . Advances in hardware are also making demands for skills that aren’t yet being met. Experian, the giant credit reporting agency, is using GPU clusters […]
