The Top 6 Hard to Fill Jobs in the IoT

Capturing the maximum benefit of IoT not only requires innovation in business models and technology, but also investment in new talent and skills. Unfortunately, today, most companies do not have the required skills and capabilities in their current organisations.

A survey by talent management solutions provider TEKsystems ranked the skills sets that companies face the biggest challenge finding. Similarly, IoT Analytics reported the top 5 new jobs created by the Industrial IoT (IIoT). The result of all these researches can be considered as a baseline for professionals who are seeking a career in IoT-related businesses. On the other hand, if you are an executive and planning to invest in IoT, you should be aware of the importance of developing strategies to retrain your personnel or obtain these skills externally.

In this article, I have consolidated both reports by adding my own thoughts and experiences as follows:

1. Security Expert: Security breaches are constantly ranked as one of the major — usually the most important — issues to exploit the true potential of IoT. Data confidentiality, privacy, and trust are the main concerns in this regard. Nearly half of all survey respondents listed security experts as the biggest challenge to find.
2. Big Data Analyst / Data Scientist: It is obvious that collecting data enables businesses to learn more about their operating environment. However, without processing and analysing the collected data, it is not possible to provide a robust solution. In the TEKsystems survey, big data analytics ranked as the second biggest challenge to find.
3. IoT Solutions Architect: IT systems in companies continue to become more complex and critical. Managing the increasing number of devices and subsystems, dealing with different platform, system and service integration problems, mapping the business needs to functional and non-functional requirements are crucial to every single project. Basically, if you don’t have the right architecture for IoT, your project will most likely come crashing down! All in all, solutions architects who have skills to design end-to-end IoT applications ranked as the third biggest challenge to find.
4. Cloud Guru: We are gradually getting familiar with the terms ranging from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) etc. Even though cloud computing is not always necessary for IoT, it might be extremely useful for addressing complicated problems. For that reason, there are many different cloud platforms are ready to use for meeting today’s high demand. However, operating and managing all those virtual machines, storage, services in an effective way and controlling cost properly are not child’s play.
5. Software Specialist / Developer: This includes all layers of an IoT solution from embedded sensor-based subsystems to IoT gateways, from native mobile front-ends to complex back-ends. Thus, current skills and expertise need to be enhanced to cover all these areas. Here, it should be noted that user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) designers are increasingly becoming more important in industry.
6. Digital Marketer: It’s not all about tech, folks! There is always a place for real business professionals who understand the technological aspects of innovation along with marketing and client management.

Conclusion

It is clear that the advancement of the technology enabled by IoT is leading to new skills and creating employment opportunities. Therefore, if you are an executive in a company, you should develop strategies to retrain your current workforce or find the required skills externally. If you are an individual, you must strengthen your profile considering the areas above in order to stand out from the crowd. Otherwise, failure is inevitable.

Having summarised the main ideas in six different categories, I can also recommend that you have a look at the references as shown below. I didn’t intentionally mention any specific technology we use today, such as programming languages, IoT gateways, edge devices, big data solutions, cloud platforms, and so on. This could be a topic for another article.

If you have views or would like to contribute, feel free to comment below!

I am also available on Twitter. You can follow my latest thoughts and updates on @KahveciSinan.

References

EIU. (2013). The Internet of Things Business Index: A quiet revolution gathers pace. The Economists Intelligence Unit.

IoT Institute. (2015). 15 Hard-To-Find IoT Skills. [Online]. (http://www.ioti.com/iot-trends-and-analysis/15-hard-find-iot-skills). IoT Institute. (25/11/2016)

IoT Analytics. (2015). The top 5 new jobs created by the Industrial IoT. [Online]. (https://iot-analytics.com/top-5-new-industrial-iot-jobs). IoT Institute. (27/11/2016)

McKinsey. (2015). Unlocking the potential of the Internet of Things. McKinsey Global Institute.