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Want an IoT job? Do small real-world projects first
Most organisations have IoT as a practice now and are looking at hiring people to kick off their projects. But there is a lack of expertise in the workforce, because the domain is new and the real world adoption of IoT is not as much as we expect it to be. Companies are setting up IoT as a practice and there is a clear need for resources. It starts from the hardware domain and goes up to software
Professionals should wait for the IoT hype to settle down and analyse what they could do in the real world, says director of WebNMS division at ZOHO Corporation
Diksha Gupta. TechGig.com
Everyone is talking about Internet of Things. And every other engineer seems to want to work in the domain. But how are companies working on IoT devices hiring? Is there a demand and supply gap?
In an interview to TechGig, Prabhu Ramachandran, director of WebNMS division at ZOHO Corporation, said that despite the hype, there is a shortage of engineers trained in IoT since the domain is new, and to bridge the gap, his company is training students in real-life projects.
Edited excerpts from the interview:
How vibrant is IoT when it comes to jobs?
Most organisations have IoT as a practice now and are looking at hiring people to kick off their projects. But there is a lack of expertise in the workforce, because the domain is new and the real world adoption of IoT is not as much as we expect it to be. Companies are setting up IoT as a practice and there is a clear need for resources. It starts from the hardware domain and goes up to software and cloud infrastructure. It's an overall field where everyone right from electronics domain, to computer science to mechanical can find a place.
But there is a lag in between demand and supply of talent. Since IoT is a new concept, not many schools and colleges have incorporated this as a subject in their curriculum.
So how are you bridging this gap?
We go to colleges and take students for internships, where we offer them an internship of anywhere between 4-6 months. The students then come to our office and we provide them with whatever they want. We allow them to dabble with real-world IoT projects and if the project requires some hardware or software, we give that free of cost to the students so that they can execute their projects. We also coach them and we have mentors to do the job. After they do the projects, they are free to go and join any IoT company. We also take some of them on board, but the broad idea is to nurture them and allow them to work with other IoT companies.
How can one become employable for getting a job in IoT?
I think there is a lot of hype around IoT. So people should wait and watch for the hype to settle down and also analyse what they could do in the real world. This hype is actually creating a lot of problem, even business-wise. People keep asking about IoT solutions, but the fact remains that customers have their own problems and they are the issues that need to be addressed today.
There are a lot of videos on YouTube that talk about geysers getting switched on as soon as the person wakes up, or other such similar things. I think that is not the real issue. People can switch on the geysers themselves. I think where IoT can really make a difference are areas like how can one's home be made secure, if one is away from home, or can one get alarmed if an authorised person moves around his home when he is away.
More social issues like how can technology help in reducing water consumption make more sense when it comes to the real world used cases. Such solutions help environment and help people save power as well. So, I think if people get the perspective of looking at the current problems and resolving them, eliminating all the hype, I think that will be helpful for people create something useful.
Also, today there are a lot of cheap technological options available for people to try out something in IoT. Like even a college student can get a Raspberry Pi and build something around it. In addition, there are a lot of communities around making it easy for people to learn, that they can create some useful IoT application.
They may not create something very big but can create something small to solve a real world problem. Once they really make a project in IoT, they will become employable. Watching videos on YouTube and reading literature may not help so much.
What should a professional, say a mechanical or electronics engineer, do to get into IoT?
If you see people who are doing the real-world IoT projects, the number is small. But industry certainly needs more people. Ideally, we can divide the professionals in to two categories: hardware and software. For someone working in the hardware domain, it would be good to have a fair idea of the software side of things, like cloud, how IoT and cloud can be aligned together, data sciences, bandwidth, et al.
On the other hand, the software professionals should know about how sensors work, how they can dabble with hardware, etc. So, IoT is a mash of hardware, which would be the motherboard, chip side of things, the silicon side, and the software side. One has to have a fair knowledge of all three to be IoT-ready and employable for this domain. One can be an expert in one of these domains, however, he/she has to be a jack of all these.
This article first appeared in techgig.com
