In a world increasingly shaped by technological innovations, the job landscape cannot stay rooted in the past. Compared to jobs being considered as a means to earn a livelihood earlier, today, the connotation has changed. Jobs have become all about building careers, moving out of the comfort zone, accepting challenges, and move up the ladder of success. The advent of technology, especially AI and ML, is expected to hit the traditional workforce in the years to come.
According to the Future of Jobs report of the World Economic Forum, the world is likely to witness the loss of around 75 million jobs by 2024. If this is a cause of concern, then the converse is also true. In other words, around 133 million new jobs are expected to be generated by that time. This would mean the potential workforce should be equipped with the wherewithal to meet the technological challenges of the future. Also, the millennials are going to form the biggest chunk of the workforce by 2020 and beyond. And enterprises would face challenges in meeting the employees’ demands for flexible work-hours, career growth, and work-life balance, among others.
The changing contours of future jobs
Fiddling with phones: With employees remaining connected to the internet through smart-phones and other digital devices at all times, employers find it difficult to stop them from idling away during productive hours.
Gaps in jobs are no longer a taboo: The focus of employers will shift towards recruiting quality talent without bothering about the gaps between jobs. Today, employers have realized that professionals can take a hiatus with reasons such as pregnancy, raising children, learning new skills, and travel, among others.
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Stress management: Stress at work has become the leading cause of attrition. Enterprises are realizing that an unhappy and stressed employee means low productivity and efficiency. So, the focus is towards giving employees the leeway such as work from home etc.
Annual performance appraisal: According to a survey, not every employee is enthused by a positive appraisal thereby leaving the organization grappling with the status.
Taking the above-mentioned challenges into consideration, let us discuss the top 5 in-demand jobs of 2020 with the potential to generate digital livelihoods.
Top 5 career options in 2020 waiting for you
- IT Security Specialist
- AI & Machine Learning Specialist
- Data Analyst
- IoT Specialist
- Back-end Developer
1. IT Security Specialist
The growing concerns around cyber-security with enterprises adopting digital transformation have created a huge demand for IT security specialists. Even as the world gets smaller and better connected through digital technologies, there is an alarming rise in cybercrime. With governments and corporations dealing with sensitive customer data or business information becoming commonplace, there is a growing need for IT security or cyber-security specialists to deal with the menace of cybercrime. The job would entail defining access rules, identifying vulnerabilities in the IT architecture, reviewing resources, and maintaining the IT systems.
2. Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Specialist
These next-gen technologies are finding increased acceptance (74% annually over the last four years – LinkedIn) in various sectors such as BFSI, retail and eCommerce, health-care, marketing, networking, and recruitment, among others. As enterprises shift towards automation to stay competitive, careers in AI and ML will become highly sought after. The application of these technologies would be in the areas of image recognition, economic forecasting, and natural language processing. So, students completing such courses from institutions can expect a 100% placement assistance from employers looking to fill their recruitment needs.
3. Data Analyst
The growing salience of data in a tech-driven world is not lost on anyone. With enterprises bracing for massive digital transformation exercise involving upgrading their legacy systems, the role of data analysis has become important. It helps in deriving insights into aspects like consumer behavior, gaining competitive advantage, and planning marketing strategies, among others. A data analyst would help a business in drawing meaningful inferences from vast clusters of data. He or she would possess the ability in finding new trends, creating spot patterns, and predicting probabilities. To succeed in this field, candidates ought to have expertise in areas like data mining, deep learning, data visualization, data science, and statistics, to name a few.
4. IoT Specialist
The Internet of Things (IoT) is going to be the technology of the future with devices or gadgets exchanging data among each other while being connected to the internet. Since the seamless functioning of each device would be integral to the success of the overall IoT ecosystem, there would be demand for specialists to keep the ecosystem up and running. Although 2020 may not witness large scale transition towards IoT systems, the niche is going to offer high paying jobs.
5. Back-end Developer
With developments in the field of 3D printing, virtual reality, mobile gaming, AI, and face recognition software gaining ground, there would be a demand for developers with the knowledge of back-end scripting language like JavaScript. Also, the digital world requires the development of APIs to connect physical devices or software to each other. This shall create a huge demand for back-end developers.
Conclusion
The year 2020 will create many job opportunities for promising candidates in the IT and other sectors. The emerging technologies will need experts who can implement them or leverage them to meet the business objectives. Students or candidates looking for jobs should equip themselves with skills in emerging technologies and derive benefits.
