Top 5 tech careers of the future

UX (User eXperience) designers are concerned with the ‘behind-the-scenes’ design of ensuring software, websites, or apps meet the consumers’ habits, motivations, behaviors and needs. With more and more businesses turning to digital platforms to promote and sell their products or services, it’s never been so important to ensure the user journey and experience is the best it can be.

What degree do you need? A relevant undergraduate degree such as computer science is needed, while a postgraduate degree is desirable also. Professional experience is a must too.

As technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, robotics engineers are having to constantly analyze, reevaluate, configure, test and maintain the prototypes, robotic components, integrated softwares and machines they create for the manufacturing, mining and automotive service industries, among others. It is a highly technical job which requires patience and rational thinking.

Over the next few years, it’s likely that we’ll see a number of new and innovative ways in which modern technologies help society and business function – particularly in healthcare.

What degree do you need? A master’s in robotics or computer science will set you up with the skills, knowledge and experience needed to break into the field of robotics engineering.

Dubbed the ‘sexiest job of the 21^st century’, data science jobs aren’t new and emerging like other tech jobs such as cloud computing engineers (more on them later), or machine learning engineers, but they’re still the hidden gem within any company and will continue to be.

As businesses and organizations collect and use more data every day, the demand for skilled experts has skyrocketed. With opportunities to work in practically every sector and industry, from IT to entertainment, manufacturing to healthcare, it’s the responsibility of data scientists to compile, process, analyze and present data for an organization in order for it to make more informed decisions.

For example, in June this year, six undergraduate students from the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (CSAM) and the School of Electrical and Information Engineering (EIE) at Wits University took part in a virtual event for the ISC Student Cluster Competition alongside 82 other students from around the world.

They were tasked with testing and optimizing several applications currently used by scientists and researchers in the analysis of COVID-19 data in real time and the effects of global warming around the world. Students were also given two additional advanced coding challenges by the judges to assess whether they could successfully adapt to the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence.

Wits University took second place.

What degree do you need? To stand out in the field of data science, a solid understanding of data science and analytics is vital. A relevant postgraduate degree in computational and applied mathematics, data science, or e-science from Wits University develops students’ data-driven knowledge and technical skillsets.

Over the last few months, cloud computing has become a must-have for those working remotely. At the same time, organizations have been frantically hiring those with the skills and knowledge who can migrate processes, implement the necessary infrastructures and perform cloud-related tasks.

Cloud engineers are often titled under different roles, including solutions architects, cloud developers and sysops engineers. In some instances, the roles and responsibilities will vary, but the overall responsibility of a cloud engineer is to plan, monitor and manage an organization’s cloud system, such as Google Cloud, Microsoft 365, and Slack, to name but a few.

What degree do you need? As with many of today’s tech careers, a postgraduate degree is almost always required along with relevant professional experience. Students who study the MSc in Computer Science at Wits University can study a range of electives including (but not limited to), high performance computing and scientific data management, robotics, adaptive computation and machine learning, multi-agent systems, and human computer interaction.