Author: Prema Chandrasekaran

TOP 9 CAREER CHOICE FOR JOB SEEKERS IN 2019

Are you a recent graduate or you’re a student about to finish your college? You’re probably already worried about what the future holds. Choosing a career and finding your calling may not be as easy as it seems. We understand your plight. We all have been there. But, it doesn’t have to be that very hard too. Just to make it a little easier for all you students out there, here are nine of the most happening careers.

1. Designing

UI/UX

User Experience(UX) is a process of designing that puts the needs of the users’ experience of the product and not just the product only. User Interface(UI) is what users see and interact with a product. UX is about knowing what the customers want, solving problems, providing solutions and giving the users what they want. UI is about making sure the visuals look good and it is easy to use.

As the technology keeps advancing, the demand for UI/UX designing increases. Adobe has some predictions of UI/UX for the following years.

Content-centric designs which mean creating visual designs based on the content and helping the users understand the content better and keeping it attractive at the same time.

Personalising the designs for users by understanding them with the help of artificial intelligence and Machine Learning.

Omnichannel UX which makes it easy for the users to shift from one device. It is not necessary that the users will only interact with the product using mobile. They can use any device, be it a system, an iPad, a voice interface etc. Omnichannel UX can help in achieving a multi-device world.

People while interacting with a product expect it to be in the same way as interacting with humans. So, focusing on humanizing digital experience is important as a UI/UX designer.

User Interface, HTML5, Usability Testing, User Research, and Interaction Design are some of the skills highly demanded as a User Experience. User Interface designer is expected to create designs, prototypes, layouts and help the Developers with testing.

Graphic Designing

Graphic designing is the art of communicating through visuals. That is why it is also called visual communication, communication design etc. As a graphic designer, you’ll be expected to create visuals through designs by using a computer software, convert ideas into art and make it attractive to the people while giving out the message.

Graphic designing has an impact on us every day without our own knowledge. There is a need for graphic designers in almost every type of companies. In the field of advertising, print media, the demand for graphic designers is never-ending.

To enter into the graphic designing, one need to expertise themselves with various tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, CorelDraw etc. If you are a person who has always looked things at a different level, creative and be able to create visuals in an attractive way, you may go for graphic designing.

Web Designing

It is important to have a website for any kind of a Business. Just like we people have a home address, a website is like an online address to the companies. The first thing that attracts the users is the website and only if the website looks well, it will help develop the business. A web designer is the one who needs to create a website by deciding the layout, color, images and the overall design of the website.

With so many designing software, you may not need to know a lot of coding but knowing a little bit of Html, CSS, JavaScript will give you a hand when you are working with developers and coders.

If you’re creative and know how to work with the colors, designs and layouts to bring out great designs, you could totally go for web designing.

The scope for web designing is huge as every business be it small or big is making sure they have an online presence.

2. Digital Marketing

Marketing a business or products or services on any of the electronic media is called digital marketing. Some of the online forms are Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Content marketing, Email marketing etc.

Every business is going online. It has become essential to create an online presence regardless of the  kind of business we are doing. Let’s just say we are hearing a company’s name for the first time. The first thing we all do is Google the company and if we don’t find the company’s website, we start to doubt their credentials. That is the scenario these days.

But is creating an online presence just enough? No, the website will not market itself and land on users’ screen. It needs organic traffic. Only if many people are visiting our website, the business is going to survive online and that’s where digital marketers come into the picture.

Digital marketers help websites get more traffic by optimizing various things in the site, which is popularly called as SEO. Various social media platforms are also used to advertise our online presence. Email marketing is widely used to attract & retain the right set of audience.

The first step to enter into digital marketing is by starting to read a lot. There are so many blogs related to digital marketing. Moz is a blog which will be of great help to understand digital marketing, blogs by Neil Patel, a famous digital influencer in the US, are simple and anyone starting out can make a great use out of it. Hubspot blogs, Digital Deepak are some other useful blogs. Joining a Digital marketing course at a reputed institute could be the next step.

There is a high demand for digital marketers with very little supply of students. If you’re someone who gets excited about the idea of learning something new everyday, love to read, love to experiment, this is for you.

3. Mobile Application

Nowadays, everybody is using smartphones and tablets, which are wireless, user-friendly and they are developed with a programming software called “Mobile Application”

Over 250 billion mobile applications were downloaded in 2017, which will give us a clear picture that the mobile application career will march through a solid and strong path in the years ahead.

Mobile apps has become a “must have” factor as they are the essential necessity because developers have designed the mobile apps in a way to increase the usability of mobile phones, scaled up the sales to a quantifiable level, reached the customers at their doorstep and have created a well-established brand awareness.

They will be handling VR and AR-based mobile apps that all the business industries like retail, real estate, education, healthcare are planning to integrate with the IoT devices like wearables like headsets, smartphone to come up with an entire visual based business suite. Developers will work towards user interaction design by adopting depth animation, transition video effects to the mobile.

A big organization will encourage BYOD (Bring Your Own Device ) model which allows employees to bring their own technologies to their work which needs a hybrid mobile app.

So, 2018 will have a great demand for mobile app developers as it will emerge out with up and coming trends and technologies in the name of ‘new app economy’.

4. Web Development

Web Development is the process of creating and maintaining websites for the internet or intranet, which might be a simple static page or a lively web application composed of motions, animation or graphics using Web designing, programming, and databases.

There are 3 types of web developers namely,

Front-end developers: constructs the page, which a person looks once he lands a website (front end of a website) Programming languages: HTML, CSS, Javascript and jQuery, etc.,

Back-end developers: responsible for security, and server performance by connecting them to website and database as required. Programming languages: PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Python,etc.,

Full stack developers: Combination of both front and back-end developers.

So a well-versed expertise in these programmes and database along with knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), WordPress, web security will do to a greater extent.

All the industries are surviving and flourishing in the digital space with the help of Web developers. E-commerce, online customer support, responsive websites, motion UI, are possible only because of web developers. Nowadays, a business can exist without an office but cannot without a website.

Along with these technical strengths, developers should update their portfolio in a personal Github account, which is considered as a standard credential in this field. Active participation in open source projects would take you long ways and boost your development skills.

There are so many reasons one could take up web development as a career but the main reason is web development is a key to a bright future because right from startups to established companies are in constant need of a web professional.

5. Machine Learning

Machine learning is the process of teaching the computer to learn the way humans do, using algorithms. Machine learning is an important part of artificial intelligence. The recommendations we get online, the Google results we get according to our preferences,  friends suggestion on Facebook are all few of the many things achieved by machine learning.

Everyone is starting to integrate machine learning into their business these days. Google making the self-driving car called Waymo and Facebook uses for understanding their users better and giving them content that they are interested in.

It is not that only big companies are using Machine Learning but a lot of machine learning based startups are formed. An Indian startup called Niki.ai is formed for the users to place orders with any kind of business, be it online shopping or ordering food or booking a cab using natural language processing and machine learning. It has integrated Facebook Messenger bot which is called “Nikibot” with which you can order and there’s no need for you to leave the app to pay the money as it lets you pay money through Paytm within the chat. According to a research made by Capgemini, 83% of companies said using AI has led to increase in the recruitment and 75% of the companies said there was an increase in sales by 10% after integrating AI into their business. It is evident that companies are looking for employees that are into AI of which machine learning being the most important.

6. Gaming

As we all know, video games have come a long road and have taken different dimensions in different industries. Smartphones, internet and technologies have been the game changer and have taken gaming to tremendous heights.

It has been predicted that gaming industry will have a skyrocketed growth of $1 billion from $360 million in 2020

Gaming developers are expected to have immense knowledge in AR and VR technologies. It has been accepted by the gaming world with a hype welcome and it is all because of high-quality AR & VR content.

The market is craving for such an exceptional content developers who can make their gaming a hit show.

This industry will require a combination of realistic engineering, analytical thinkers and creative minds.

The gaming industry is trying to immerse the current generation into their technology by their mind-blowing animation and graphics.

So gaming career is always an interesting job to take up as it will test your minds to hardcore.

7. Big Data

Every day, we recollect enormous memories and happenings of our lives to make use of it in the form of decision making, tuning up of our minds, etc. So Data and information act as a base for all of us throughout our lives and even in the business process. Likewise, capturing a large voluminous structured and unstructured data and eventually storing, analyzing sharing, visualizing them are the main concept behind the Big word ‘Big Data’.

Around the globe, all the businesses are striving to optimize and get transformed into an updated version of themselves. Creation and innovation factor plays a vital role in such a transit mode and big data will make it happen. For example, the Big brands like amazon, flipkart achieved such benchmarks using the concept of online shopping. This needs more of data and information right from user’s login to successful purchase. So big data helps in understanding the customers, their behavior and preferences. Similarly, we can correlate the essence of big data in various business processes.

Big data is used in major industries like healthcare, science and research, machine learning, security and law enforcement, financial trading

But how will you become a big data expert? You can run the show with the basic skills of quants, stats, analysis, visualization, problem solving and creativity along with the technical skills of Hadoop, Apache spark, NoSQL, Data mining, programming languages etc

So bigdata is a buzzword of tomorrow and it is your call to be a part of that buzzzzz…

8. Cloud computing

Cloud Computing in simpler terms, means storing, accessing and retrieving a company’s data and programs over the internet instead of a local server and PC hard drives. The term cloud is a metaphor for the Internet.

Today, 79% of companies run all their work process over a cloud storage. So future will have ample space and needs technical persons to handle such a versatile task of handling invisible servers.

While most of the companies are switching to cloud platform, they are facing a serious problem that there is not a proper cloud person to do the job right! This has created enough boom for cloud Developers.

We do have various cloud systems like Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, salesforce to name a few.

A developer who deals with serverless computers, software containers, IoT (Internet of Things) are in great demand. An understanding of AWS’ Lambda or Microsoft’s Azure Functions is a great way to get your foot in the door for such a position.

Every cloud companies are offering certification opportunity which is a basic credential and an added value for your career. Right from IBM to Google, they provide certification to their developers to their proficiency in their future jobs. AWS certification is a notable one in the present job market.

Future is slowly marching towards an invisible scenario of shifting from on-premise servers to cloud services. So Cloud developers lead the crew in the future.

9. Ethical Hacking

Ethical hacking is a legal way of hacking a system to identify the threats in a computer network and security. Ethical hackers are also called the “White Hat” of hacking. It is mainly asked by companies to check if there are any vulnerabilities in the security and to fix them if any.

Ethical hackers are in high demand these days in India with not many people aware of such a thing exists only. Companies facing cyber threats are in need of ethical hackers to help them overcome security issues and make the security tighter. The security can be ensured only if the network has been tried in every hacking way possible.

There are a few things you need to start doing right away to make ethical hacking your career. Ethical hackers should know the programming languages like C, C++, Perl, Python, and Ruby. And if it is for web hacking, HTML, Javascript, PHP, SQL should be known. Apart from the programs, they should also have an understanding of different versions of Linux Operating System, Windows, Firefox

Globally, many innovation and upgradation are happening on the flow. All the above listed are just to name a few. You have to analyze your own skills and capability to decide your career. If you’re about to graduate with a qualification which suits any of these fields, your future is going to be a remarkable one. Even if you’re an experienced professional, a career change or a step up into one of these professions might be tempting. However, these predictions and qualification might not be a game changer. You are the one and only one who can influence your life and career. The better you do what you love, the best your tomorrow is!