Engineering & Jobs of the Future

In times, when the man travels from Japan to the USA before the sun, when we find clothes to life-partners online and when people are more interested in stealing ideas rather than money… Technology is evolving, so is the world, be prepared. It’s going to be different. We would be controlling our dreams with computer software, having pizza delivered to our doorstep via drones, and doctors would be removing fat deposits from our arteries by nanobots, the size of fleas. A decade ago, these ideas were science fiction. Today, they’re becoming science fact.

If you’re a student and looking to establish yourself (research and innovate) in a field of study that has a bright future in the world of high technology, then you’ll need the mindset of a futurist. Understanding the direction of technology will help you decide how you want to position yourself to succeed. The following are a few examples of the sort of tech jobs you can expect to see within the next 5 to 10 years if advancements continue along the paths they are going.

Drone Programmers

Amazon recently hogged the media limelight for its product-delivering drones. By now you’ve probably heard about Amazon’s media campaign claiming that in the near future, Amazon drones would be delivering products to our homes in less than 30 minutes. So where is it headed? Of course, drones are going to enter into many other industries including agriculture, law enforcement, search and rescue, and even action photography.

The reality is that all of these drones are going to need experts who know how to build them, program them, fly them and repair them. These days, everyone is talking about drones. Investigators and journalists want to use them for field investigations. Filmmakers want to capture stunning aerial footage. Real estate agents, farmers and construction companies want to use them to capture aerial images of property and land.

We recently covered about ideaforge in our post, the Indian start-up that develops Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). You might be interested in an engineering degree with a specialization in drones, or simply starting your own business as an aerial drone photographer.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Well, similar in concept in Google’s self-driving car. The cars of the future will likely be electrically powered, and they will also likely be completely driverless. These are exciting possibilities, but it’ll also require skilled programmers who understand the algorithms and systems within these new cars. The automotive technician of the future will have significantly more computer skills than the technicians of today.

Neuro-Therapy

Mental health continues to be a major worry around the world. The majority of treatments have been a combination of medicine and counseling that help symptoms to subside, but almost never completely eradicate the illness. We have been using electrodes and electricity to pass through that delicate brain, but still, have not come up with a complete cure.

It is conceivable that in the future, neuroscientists will develop “brain pacemaker” devices that can deliver Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) to patients at regular intervals, finally curing diseases like Parkinson’s, severe depression, and more.

In an interview in the MIT Technology Review, Managing Director of NeuroInsights, Zack Lynch, explained the future of these devices as follows:

With these technologies, you can create noninvasive devices and target very specific parts of the brain. It’s like going from a Model T to a Ferrari. Those technologies will present the real competition for drugs. 

When this technology enters the market and starts curing patients of debilitating mental illnesses, it’ll give the pharmaceutical industry a run for its money.  Those electronic devices and those treatments will require experts who understand how they work and can administer them to patients.

Virtual Reality Designers

Twenty years ago, virtual reality headsets were the hallmark of many science fiction movies, used as a way to immerse characters into a digital landscape. In the movie Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page, the characters have the technology to model and create entire dream worlds, which other people are able to experience as an actual dream. Future virtual reality designers will be exactly what this movie envisioned – architects of virtual worlds that are fabricated from the very minds of the designers themselves.

The ability to design and program virtual worlds will surely require some high technical training. The very nature of creating new virtual worlds is a very creative process so it will require very creative individuals too. If you are the kind of person that has a very strong technical knowledge-base and are visually creative – this may be the perfect future job for you.

While there are some other future jobs and area of study that will explode like a super-nova, we can’t cover it all here. Cyber Security, Idea-patenting, Smart-homes, Artificial Intelligence programmer, Robo-cops are phenomena that might occupy most of the newspaper columns in coming times.

With HireTale, you can rest assured, we would still be the front-runner to bring those tech jobs to you.