Sunday, April 3, 2011

The Technology Jobs of the Future

The high tech jobs of the future are in analytics, mobility and cloud computing, said T K Kurien, CEO of Wipro Ltd. in a meeting with Dow Jones reporters and editors.

Kurien predicts that IT spending will increase by between 2% and 3% this year, but, unlike in years past, budgets will be shifted toward analytics, mobility and cloud applications and away from IT hardware purchasing and information capture.

Only 10% to 15% of Fortune 1000 companies are currently using analytics in a sophisticated way to improve internal performance and augment relationships with customers and vendors, said Kirk Strawser, global head of consulting services at the Indian IT services outsourcing firm. Most firms are "sticking their toe in the water" because they realize being able to analyze data and act on it is essential to future success. Wipro wants to hire IT professionals in these areas to continue shifting its business from simply being a low-cost provider to offering higher valued IT services, Kurien said. Around 2009, clients began to care less about cost and more about finding business solutions through sophisticated technology, he said.

"That's where we see the big, big change happening," Kurien said. The most successful engineers of the future will be those able to connect numbers data to actionable insights for companies, he said.

"Our view is that there are plenty of smart people out there who can write algorithms," he said. "Linkage back to performance management is really where we think is a sweet spot."

Tech professionals of the future also don't necessarily need to be engineering, math or computer science majors. Kurien said that the company likes to hire liberal arts graduates and train them in IT. "They might not do a lot of the heavy coding, but they do a lot of work around business analysis and stuff like that," Kurien said. "The best programmers are now musicians."

Over the next six months in Atlanta, for example, the company is hiring 200 software developers and business analysts, many of them MBAs and liberal-arts graduates from local universities.

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Kurien cited an application one of his engineers created for internal use as an example of the kind of sophisticated insights Wipro hires will be expected to develop. When visitors come to its campuses in India, Wipro scans social networks for information about them. The application then generates questions Wipro managers can ask that might appeal to a visitor's hobbies and interests.

"You can figure out, 'Is the person an introvert or an extrovert?' depending on the kinds of posts they put on Facebook," Kurien said.

The application isn't available to clients or consumers, he said, citing competitive advantage.