The High Demand Careers for 2022

As you look forward to what you hope is going to be a great new year with some of the trials and tribulations behind us, it’s good to take stock and look at how some of the trends from 2021 are going to influence the direction of your career this year and beyond.

You may be trying to decide on a major or perhaps looking to specialize in a particular engineering discipline and it would be good to see how the chips may fall.

Information Technology has always been a high demand career but 2022 is going to really raise the bar.  

Here are the high demand careers for 2022:

Remote Communication & Collaboration

Working from home is putting a lot of emphasis on all areas of online life. 

Many businesses, particularly startups and technology companies are embracing hybrid working where employees can use meeting rooms and hot desking when essential, but the days of large head offices are numbered.

The everyday use of video conferencing with Zoom and Teams is becoming the normal way to communicate for a new generation of businesses.

A lot of development is going into Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) to make these services more reliable and allow seamless collaboration with apps and data management in an environment that is easier and more intuitive to navigate.

Software engineers with experience in graphics and cloud services like AWS Sumerian and Spatial.io are going to be highly sought after.

Labor Shortages are Giving Employees More Negotiating Power

As the balance of power moves from employer to employee in the jobs market, businesses need to automate more processes and reduce their reliance on labor. Although this may be bad news for some, it’s fuelling a huge rise in demand for information technology specialists in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics.

This is particularly important for skilled hardware specialists as remote control of machinery in healthcare is starting to take hold. Biomedical engineers with skills in robotics and bioinformatics are going to find a lot of interested potential employers.

Bricks and Mortar are Giving Way To E-Commerce 

The last couple of years have pushed commerce out of the malls and industrial parks and onto the web. Everything associated with online trading is booming. This is driving demand for IT professionals in all disciplines but particularly data science. 

Back in 2008 Clive Humby the British mathematician and architect of the Tesco Club Card declared: 

Data is the new oil

Since then every retailer and business to business enterprise has been gathering data in vast quantities on every aspect of their customer interactions. The wider use of cloud computing has freed the databases to grow to spectacular proportions. 

This data needs to be managed and analyzed to make it useful to drive marketing and product development. The increased use of machine learning to feed artificial intelligence algorithms for data mining has taken off in the last couple of years. 

Anyone with skills in this area is in high demand.

The “Always On” Culture

Gone are the days of switching on your computer to check your email.

Smartphones and social media have taken society online. Phones ping with alerts and people now get far more news and views than ever before. Modern life is connected and all our interactions with family, retailers, banks and government have moved online.

The skills required in IT development are, of course, for building apps and web services infrastructure. However just knowing programming is no longer enough. 

User Experience (UX) is everything. Making the online experience easy and intuitive to use is vital to the success of the businesses that use them to deliver their products and services. 

Everything is moving towards an all encompassing Web 3. The “browser” is now the focus of web development so JavaScript is becoming the highest demand language for programmers working on the human/machine interface.

Is your head in the clouds?

Most businesses are moving their operations to cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This raw computing power is being used to create a new breed of Software as a Service (SAAS) platforms to present their own products and services for business automation and data management.

Engineers with a deep knowledge of cloud computing are worth their weight in gold.

The Rise Of The “Metaverse”

2021 was a good year for crypto currency with both Bitcoin and Etherium showing spectacular growth.

When Satoshi Nakamoto used blockchain technology to create Bitcoin back in 2011 his aim was to provide mankind with a currency that could not be controlled by a single individual, corporation or government. The blockchain provides an unalterable and public record of every transaction written to it. The technology is now being used for many applications that require trustless, decentralized data management.

Ethereum is fast becoming the go-to blockchain for NFTs and the Smart Contracts that drive a plethora of new Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Blockchain technology is coming of age and the demand for programmers and analysts that can work with applications tied into the chains are in high demand. This is not just mining but building the infrastructure around blockchains to create Web 3 and the Metaverse

It may not be immediately obvious what blockchain has to do with what Mark Zuckerberg is touting as the Metaverse with its emphasis on VR/AR from both browser-based apps and headsets. 

Blockchain smart contracts and NFTs are rapidly becoming the trustless user ID and access control mechanisms for Web 3 and the all-encompassing online community that will become the Metaverse. 

Engineers and IT professionals that understand this and can work in development or explain this to the public will be highly sought-after in 2022.

Crime is Moving Online Too!

Hacking, Viruses and Phishing have always been a problem. The use of “Denial of Service” attacks for protest and blackmail is ingrained in the fabric of the online world.

However, “cybercrime” is reaching a new level. More of life has moved into the always-on culture of smartphones, social media, and the huge repositories of “big data”. The opportunities for criminal gangs in online fraud and even state sponsored cybercrime are becoming a major issue. 

The work required to secure our online data is even more important than ever and engineers with skills in attack prevention, mitigation and recovery are in high demand.

How To Find The Right Opening

Here at Step Up Recruiting, we specialize in finding the right jobs for IT engineers so you’re in the right place. Drop us a line and we will help you find your perfect match.