Future career trends

Computer Technology
The fastest growing area of employment in U.S. in recent years has been computer technology. Technological advance and the continued integration of IT and digital communications into the workplace throughout the private, public and voluntary sectors ensures that this trend will continue for some time. Systems analysts, designers and developers, computer programmers, web developers, consultants and information managers reflect the range of these career areas. Hardware engineers are also needed, working in infrastructure construction and repair, fibre, cable, satellites, etc.

Healthcare sector
Another guaranteed growth area is the healthcare sector. The increasing number of healthcare jobs is directly attributable to the growing age of the population – people are living longer so there are more people in the older age groups – and the expansion of treatments available for medical conditions, whether delivered in the primary healthcare sector or within hospitals. Consequently, there is also an expansion in the number of administrative and support roles needing to be filled.

Other Careers
Other careers deemed to be ‘hot’ future career prospects relate to areas of scientific advance, and in particular the “bio” sciences, such as biotechnology. Tissue engineers and gene programmers have been highlighted, but all skill levels are included – as companies grow, so does their administration infrastructure. Other new scientific areas include nanotechnology and energy technology. Demographic changes are leading to other needs in addition to healthcare. Teaching and tourism, training and development, and care of the elderly are all areas where openings are set to increase, as are financial advisors.

Service sector
Services that already exist will grow further as the population ages. Standard professions include the legal sector, police, teachers, tutors, etc. Meanwhile, there is a general return amongst certain income sectors of paying for domestic support with the services of maids and cleaners, drivers, etc. This is increasingly common as the higher divorce levels yield more one-parent families. New services are developing that are opening out into recognized career fields. Many of these are provided directly to the consumer. Counselling and various complementary therapies are obvious examples, as well as physical training instructors and coaches.

Shortage of 70,000 networking pros! in India

New Delhi, March 24 -- Computers that process data and software that power them separately create hundreds of thousands of jobs worldwide, the networking technologies that link the two together are often missed in the buzz.

The world's leading networking equipment company, Cisco Systems, estimates that India is facing a shortage of 70,000 professionals in networking alone, as data centres mushroom and the Internet expands to help businesses and homes alike.

California-based Cisco, which started out with routers and expanded into a range of switches and end-user gear such as conferencing systems, says an increasing trend to outsource IT infrastructure management will only widen the shortfall in the months to come.

Quality networking professionals are a rare species at the global level too. Globally, the shortage is as high as one million.

Apart from maintaining switches and routers, networking experts also take care of security and risk management in data centres and employ "virtualisation" under which a job done by a machine can now be executed through software, enabling easier network management from remote locations. Network architecture, network design, unified communications and cloud computing would also be the trends over the next five years.