Current and Future Landscape of IoT Job Opportunities and Growing Market

More we get surrounded by new-age technologies, more our future marries the deployment of machine advents. The pace at which advancement is taking place, all our jobs will be disrupted with novel job opportunities in the near future. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data Analytics, Data Science, Robotics, and significant others are creating a great buzz in the futuristic job market. Moreover, simultaneous gradual evolution in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT) is cutting of human interference across many sectors. Meantime the IoT breakthrough is also bound to create a new set of jobs for those who possess the ability to thrive with time and upskill their talent.

Although the wave of the fourth industrial revolution has instilled a grave fear among professionals regarding job losses, technologies like Internet of Things will undoubtedly open unexplored avenues for them. Let's see what is the current landscape of IoT job market.

The contemporary IoT job market is growing at a great pace with the increase in demand for skilled engineers and tech professionals who can serve the connectivity of billions of connected devices.

However, unfortunately, Immersat Research Programme research shows that around 47% of organizations surveyed do not possess correct IoT skills and pressing on the idea to outsource everything. In addition to this, Gartner predicts that around 75 percent of the IoT projects may take twice as long as they should because of the shortage of IoT talent.

Moreover, as noted by Glassdoor, the average base salary of an IoT professional in India is US$3,965 per year while in the US the same accounts for US$72,323 per year.

For IoT engineers in India, the average salary ranges from US$3657 – US$22,651 per year. In the US the average pays for such engineers ranges between US$51,000- US$110,000 per year.

Following Data Science, Internet of Things is one of the job opportunities with quite a handsome paycheques. To grab such lucrative opportunities, the professionals need to stay updated and evolve with the rising trends or else they will meet the same fate as employees from Tech Mahindra, CTS, TCS, and Infosys met in 2017 with massive layoffs. Call it a cost-cutting strategy or not but the reality behind the cut-off was that techies were not able to pace up with the emerging trends and as claimed by the companies their skills could have been easily replaced by mere computer-codes.

Impact of COVID-19 on IoT Jobs

The circumstances around COVID-19 will also undoubtedly impact aspects of the IoT market beyond healthcare. A prolonged period in which "social distancing" becomes the norm should result in greater reliance on automated solutions in a range of industries. Smart retail, for instance, could see a tremendous boost.

Movement restrictions imposed in many countries mean that millions of employees are working from home and their usual places of work are shut. The timeframe for a return to normality, including office work, is highly uncertain. Nevertheless, both governments and companies with physical facilities are planning for a return to normality.

Moreover, the Forrester Research showcases that healthcare technologies will be seen as a greater priority among IoT service providers in a post-pandemic world. The latest figure presented by the research depicts that only 7% of the work that major IoT service providers deliver in APAC is on Smart Healthcare.

Future Outlook

According to Fortune Business Insights, the global internet of things (IoT) market was valued at US$190 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach US$1,102.6 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 24.7 percent in the forecast period.
Advanced principal technologies and a proliferation of devices have helped fuel the growth of IoT technologies. In fact, investments in IoT technology are projected to grow at 13.6 percent per year through 2022. Further growth in the coming years will be possible thanks to new sensors, more computing power, and reliable mobile connectivity.

As noted by Gartner, sensor technology—embedded in IoT devices—will continue to become cheaper, more advanced, and more widely available. In turn, this availability and cost-effectiveness will make new sensor applications possible, including large-scale monitoring and detection. Meanwhile, computing power has increased about 100 times in the past 15 years. Applications such as real-time analytics and artificial intelligence can thus shift activity from local devices toward cloud and edge computing solutions. In addition, improved mobile connectivity with the advent of 5G will allow new applications for experiences such as augmented and virtual reality.

Finally, the IoT market will grow because existing IT devices will need to be linked to the IoT. Growth in traditional connected IT devices is admittedly moderate—about 2 percent per year. However, the installed base of more than five billion smartphones, two billion personal computers, and one billion tablets indicate a massive market for device integration.