IT majors used to sit in the back office and wait for the receptionist to have problems with the phone line or for the CEO to receive another e-mail attachment they didn’t know how to open.
As technologyinvadeseverysinglefield,theopportunities that open up with an IT degree are becoming more and more interesting and complex. IT professionals are almost always formally trained and have a long career ladder to climb, no matter what industry they decide to specialize in.
Architecture/Housing
Engineers primarily dominate the smart housing market right now, but there is a need for computer programmers to design software that will run different automations in the home, whether it’s maintaining heating and cooling temperatures, closing and opening blinds or even controlling the audio systems.
Smarthomesrevolve around making life easier—something programmers have been striving for since Lovelace and Babbage. The integration of smart homes, IT professionals and engineers is a match made in a perfectly climate controlled heaven.
Manufacturing
Once upon a time, blue collar workers were worried that robot mechanisms were stealing their jobs. Truthfully, automation does indeed cut down on the amount of factory floor workers needed.
However, it spawned a need for a new field: robot programming. After all, someone has to be the onetomake sure the toasters are performing properly and assign them their tasks.Robot programmers typically have an associate degree in a technological field and are trained on-site for their specialized work. Since the field is in its early stages of growth, many programmers are also educating others about their work, whether it’s through sales pitches or training programs.Marketing
Good marketers follow the crowd just long enough to advertise to them. Since the crowd is converging to online mediums, marketers have required more and more technology-minded individuals to keep up.
In the marriage between IT and marketing skills, digital marketing engineers were born. They understand how to reach a consumer and how to deliver that message most effectively. Digital marketing engineers go beyond just creating websites and focusing on SEO to designing the architecture behind an SMS marketing plan or a direct e-mail campaign.
Medicine
IT professionals with an eye on database building should look no further than the medical field. Most doctors’ offices and hospitals already have a database in place at this point, but it’s time for most of them to be update and re-programmed to take advantage of new technology.
The medical field was one of the first to embrace online database technology, and they’ve also been one of the first to incorporate tablets and smart phones to improve their access to those files. Hospital workers can now use mobile technology to check a patient’s medical history or current files.
Where there’s a technology, there’s a programmer. IT pros are needed to create both the databases and the software that allows mobile media to access them.
Publishing
Since the advent of the Kindle, publishing has been creeping slowly towards becoming more digital. There are, of course, programs that have already been created that will work with a word document to translate it into an e-book. Those have sprung up quite quickly and will remain a force in the market.
However, more popular authors will want their e-books to have the special touch that only a programmer can provide. And, as the e-reader technology begins to compete with tablets, there will also be more of a push to have more apps and a better web browsing experience integrated into their systems.
