Where the Emerging Tech Jobs Are

There’s an article published in InfoWorld on jobs trends in several emerging tech areas. The trends are based on analysis of job postings and job-seeker searches from the beginning of 2014, sourced by Indeed.com. I would have liked to dig deeper into Inded.com, to get more info on jobs in our industry but unfortunately it seems you need a magic key to get anything beyond the sample trends (at least for job postings), so I’ll have to stick to what is covered in the InfoWorld article.

This article tracked job trends in 3D printing, Bitcoin/Blockchain/crypto-currency, VR/AR and mixed reality, AI and machine learning, IoT and wearable tech. These aren’t broken down into hardware versus software versus system, so we must take what we can from the gross metrics.

In job postings, AI/ML is climbing fast and is well ahead of all other domains, ending the year a factor of at least 6 over everything except IoT. IoT has also been climbing rapidly (until recently) but even so, AI/ML postings were about 50% ahead. The other four groups are down in the weeds in job postings, led by VR/AR/MR, then 3D printing, then Bitcoin and similar technologies, with wearable tech bumping along the bottom.

The upward slope in AI/ML has been significant since July of last year, easily outpacing IoT which is still rising, but not especially fast. What’s even more interesting is a comparison of job postings versus job searches for AI/ML, which shows postings 50% ahead of searches by the end of last year. There are a lot more jobs being offered in this area than there are people looking for them, even though searches in this area are also on a rapid rise. Seems this is a good area to invest learning/credit time for anyone still in college or planning a career change.

Again, these are gross trends. What these trends mean for a hardware or embedded software design in any of these domains remains a mystery, but I would have to assume that overall demand is something of a pointer for trends in sub-domains. Also, trends change. Maybe AI/ML will hit a speed-bump (it’s happened before). But I’m guessing that won’t happen for a while – AI/ML success in speech and image recognition, also in online advertising and preference detection will likely continue to stimulate growth in those domains.

Here’s the InfoWorld article. I’ll promise a blog on a topic of your choice to the first person who can show me how to get trend data in multiple domains from Indeed.com (without having to pay for something).

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