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Hot Jobs in 2010

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

India has always been looked as a place from where companies could hire

programmers and coders because of the vast talent pool available. Indian

software developers were equally on demand internationally as well. All actions

came to a halt with the economic downturn last year. Now economy is crawling

back in to shape. So the demand curve for software pros is going to rebound. But

now, organizations are looking for software professionals who can see the bigger

picture, and not have just the micro view of the project they are assigned. The

shift is towards professionals who apart from having IT knowledge would also be

aware of industry dynamics and can adapt to the changing needs of the industry

and be up with the competition. Enterprises are now starting to spend again on

streamlining their business processes by using IT thereby creating new

opportunities in the IT job market. The important thing for professionals now is

to know the areas that would see most traction, and accordingly hone their

skills and learn relevant technologies to be ready.

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Evergreen Java and  .NET



The two key technology platforms used by software houses the world over for

developing applications are Java and .NET. The professionals having core

expertise in either of these enjoy being in the evergreen market demand. There

are two professional career paths that these professionals can follow. One

towards web development and the other to enterprise class applications

development. The application development both on web front as well on the

enterprise level will be on demand and so the demand for such professionals will

always be there. But just knowing the core technology is not of much help

nowadays. As the skill requirement for Java and .NET developers now encompasses

not being just a web developer or an enterprise developer but to be able to

bridge the gap between the two. For instance, a Java professional of enterprise

applications would be having expertise on J2EE technologies like Java EJBs, RMI

or Spring framework and other distributed computing components. Since the

natural progression is now more towards web oriented applications, a developer

needs to add skillsets for web technologies to his core expertise, so as to be

able to adapt and make himself suitable to the changing needs. Similarly for

.NET developers, there isn't any dearth of opportunities. There is a lot

happening in the Web 2.0 space. So a developer can also build skills on

technologies that enable the next generation web such as Silverlight, AJAX,

Expression as well as those which enable rich user experiences such as WPF.

Cloud C­omputing



This year saw Cloud computing as the big buzzword. And just because of the

benefits that the cloud computing architecture offers, it's going to be adopted

in a large scale. Many organizations have started contemplating having their own

private clouds or plan to offer Cloud based services. The application

development for the Cloud is not any different from mainstream application

development, but there are some constraints attached to that. A developer of

enterprise applications knows what his likely overhead is going to be, as his

application will be in a closed environment. While application deployed on the

Cloud will have to be flexible and robust enough to scale itself to the sudden

inflow of requests and also retract back when there is no traffic or requests so

as to save on resources. Such constraints will have to be kept in mind by

developers while developing applications for the Cloud environment. Google

AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, Amazon are few cloud platforms for which developers

can build and deploy applications.

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Enterprise applications like CRM, ERP etc. which were already being offered

as SaaS based services, are now being hosted on Cloud platform. Similarly

enterprises who would be setting up their private clouds would be shifting their

existing applications to the new platform. There would be a need for such

application to be compliant with the Cloud architecture. There would be need to

modify and test the applications for the Cloud. This would require both

developers as well as testers for the process of transition to the Cloud

platform.





Post recession as the Indian industry is growing, more and more Indian
employers are realizing that there is a need for technical people. This

thought was missing earlier. Now we are seeing people who want to remain

technical and not foray into management side. Earlier people with 8-9 years

of experience were pushed into project management and program management.

Now the mindset is changing as people want to be technical managers rather

than person managers. This is largely due to the fact that customers want

experienced people for their projects and not people with just 2-3 years of

experience. This is one trend that industry is seeing post recession.

The hot jobs for next year will be for those with lot

of GUI expertise. The Indian developers used to focus mostly on middleware

and considered GUI as designer related job. The other would be on the

applications being delivered on the hand-held devices.

Umesh Wason, AVP - Talent Acquisition,

GlobalLogic

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Era of Rich Internet Apps



With the advent of Web 2.0 there has been an increased focus towards user

experience and interactive software development. The appearance of Rich Internet

Applications (RIAs) is the result of this evolvement. Unlike standard HTML based

application, RIAs enable seamless and interactive transitions from one stage to

another. RIAs offer enterprises a new platform for various types of content

distribution as RIAs allow allocation of text, images, audio and video data in

the most effective and user-oriented way. For many years, we have been seeing

Flash based animations and regarded it as an overload while delivering a

webpage. But now Flash with supported functionalities of Flex and AIR has become

the main platform for RIA development. Flash's competitors, such as JavaFx and

Silverlight, are also upping the ante on features and performance. Microsoft's

Silverlight though stands second, it's surprising that JavaFX has lagged behind

in the race of RIAs. The upcoming set of new web standards, i.e. HTML 5 will

also be incorporation RIA functionalities including database connectivity. With

so much happening on the technology front, and also organizations coming up with

more intuitive, interactive and rich applications, having an RIA expertise will

be the key resume differentiator for the coming year.





Web is here to stay. And two things that developers ever demanded were A) a
channel through which their application can reach to a maximum audience and

web provides that potential to reach out to the whole world; and B) the user

should have a friction free access to the application. Again the web enables

that, the user just has to fire up the browser and type the URL to access

the application. These two attribute make the web powerful and exciting

medium. There is proliferation of mobile devices too, people want to move

seamlessly between web and the mobile devices, and they expect same

experience. So if you are a developer then think of mobile development as it

is going to continue to be a hot area. The other area that will be hot in

next few months will be the Cloud. People first need to fundamentally

understand what it means to play in the cloud.

S Somasegar, Senior Vice-President, Developer

Division, Microsoft

As discussed earlier, it is not enough to know core languages; Java or .NET.

Enterprises are looking at adding more disparate functionalities to their

applications, it's imperative and essential for a developer to be able to grasp

on opportunities to know at least one of the RIA associated framework and

technology. The gap between the designer and the developer is now fading.

Earlier developers didn't focus on the design of their applications. Now as user

experience is rated the most on any software development project, the focus of

developer is towards design also. Microsoft's Silverlight or JavaFX or even Flex

and AIR are the technologies that are not difficult to learn and provide

developer to add RIA functionalities to their applications. It's not just the

Web but also desktop applications that are being delivered on RIA platform.

Application like TweetDeck, a desktop client for Twitter or Ebay's client

applications are based on AIR. Flex and AIR developers can command for high

opportunity and demand as organizations are developing RIA applications for

their users and thus creating huge demand for such professionals.

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There is a huge demand supply gap of good embedded technology professionals
in India. As I see, it may be because nobody wants to touch the hardware

now, everybody wants to write applications. Nowadays a developer can't debug

his application by looking at the memory dump. This is because he wants to

be a software developer and not a hardware or embedded developer. If

somebody wants to be an embedded developer he should know the computer

architecture and should be able to write applications for different

architectures and also to debug their applications, as it is a major thing

as there are very few professionals who know how to debug embedded

applications. He can expect his career in embedded technology to have

success then. As India is becoming a destination for offshore embedded

works, there is a huge growth potential in the field and lots of

opportunities.

Mr. Sanjoy Maity, Vice President of Software

Engineering, American Megatrends (AMI)


Mobile development



iPhones, Blackberrys and other smartphones have triggered a whole new avenue as
a career for software developers. It won't be wrong to say that enterprises are

going mobile. Because, applications that a business user would want are

available to him on his smartphone, for example he can send/ receive emails,

view and create documents and presentations, etc. As smartphones are becoming

more powerful and replacing computers or notebooks, enterprises want

applications like CRM or BI to be available to their employees. The coming year

will see more and more organizations delivering their enterprise applications on

the mobile platform.

But mobile platforms are on disparate frameworks, be it Java, Windows or

Symbian. A developer who wants to foray into the mobile development domain will

have to gain core expertise in one of the framework. For instance, a Java

developer should gain knowledge of java ME along with the specifications of CLDP,

etc. Similarly .NET developers have a good prospect here as many of these areas

are based on .NET framework and developers having core .NET skills can switch

easily to mobile domain. These technologies are seeing large-scale adoption in

small as well as large IT companies in India and developers are uniquely

positioned to leverage this opportunity without having to go through a

completely new learning curve.

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Unlike iPhone, the new Android platform is open and developers can build

applications for the phones that will be on Android platform. This too has

opened new opportunity for developers who want to work freelance, and can sell

their applications as downloads from Android store.

Embedded technologies



The advent of mobile devices and smart electronic devices has opened up an

exciting area for embedded software developers. With embedded technology being

used in digital devices of daily use, like cellphones, televisions, video

players, cameras, cars, etc, the IT industry needs professionals -both hardware

as well as software levels, for embedded software. With devices mostly being

based on ARM chips or x86, it is important for embedded software developers to

have complete knowledge of the architecture knowledge of C/ C++ languages for

programming purposes. A developer should know the different architectures of the

chipsets and how to deploy an application across.

It's not that embedded developers would be planting BIOS and other hardware

level programs into the devices. Now as netbooks are becoming popular and dual

chipset based netbooks being available having both Intel as well as an ARM

processor. It has opened up avenues like having a complete operating system like

Android embedded into the ARM chipset. There are many innovations going in the

industry and thus is the increasing demand-supply gap for embedded professionals

in India.

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Project management



The biggest revenue provider to the Indian IT Industry is the IT

services/export industry. Success for an organization  is defined by the ability

to deliver projects on time, within budgets as per the defined scope. Project

management plays a crucial role in the success of the Indian IT Industry. It is

also evident from the fact that a majority of the members of the PMI community

comes from the IT industry. Most enterprises now demand Project management

certification for employment or advancement as a Project Manger in the

organization.





Given the current economic scenario and the growth of the IT Services sector
there is going to be pressure on the delivery team both in terms of resource

allocation and meeting scope commitments. These are integral part of the

Project Management. We believe that Project Management is a skill for life

and thus opportunities to use the discipline within and without the job is

very high. At the start of the career of a software developer he is like a

sales person. With experience and performance, a sales person then becomes a

sales manager. It is well known that all good sales people do not become

good sales managers. In the same way, a software developer needs to acquire

new skills and knowledge to perform as a team lead or project manager.

Project Management certification helps a developer to demonstrate that he

has acquired the required skills and is ready for career enhancement.



Raj Kalady
, Managing Director, Project Management Institute -India


Project management as a career can take you to different directions and to

many different industries. It is the domain knowledge which helps in deciding

which industry you are apt for. Coming from an IT industry does not bound you to

handle the projects in IT industry only. Your IT knowledge and project

management skills can be suitable for enterprises that are going through various

IT implementation projects --for instance a financial institution or a bank may

require Project Mangers to handle their bank's automation project which will

require the expertise of an IT professional having project management

experience. IT professionals can aim for the project manager positions not only

in IT companies, but also for the IT functions in other industries as well.

There are industry recognized professional project management certifications

that include PMP, PRINCE2 that can be pursued. IBM in particular also has

accreditation and certification programs for different proficiency levels in

project management. As per a salary survey conducted by ZDNET, candidates with

PMP certifications were the highest paid. Thus, with a PMP certificate from a

Project Management Institute one can broaden his scope not only for Indian

companies but also abroad.

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