What Are the Most Innovative Careers For a Tech Graduate?
What Are the Most Innovative Careers For a Tech Graduate?
Some people get out of college, clutching their new diploma, and survey the job field with a finicky air. Sure, sometimes you want to go where the money is, or where there's the most stability, but for the starry-eyed dreamers amongst us, the principle attraction of a tech career is what kind of innovative new technologies we'll be working with. While not all of us can get a glamorous job right out of college, we don't want to get stuck being a sysadmin in a basement somewhere.
So here's the fields of today which have the most promise for innovation. Even if you can't get into one of these positions right away, it might be something to aim for down the road.
Computer Security
When *isn't* security an innovative field? As the history of computing has shown us so far, there is no such thing as a perfectly secure system. Instead, we have had an arms race, with the "black hat" hackers on one side and the "gray hat" security researchers on the other. Working in computer security will guarantee that you'll be pushed to the cutting edge of the latest developments in cryptography and software engineering. This field has the most fascinating conferences.
Visual Effects
An obvious one. As consumers continue to get the latest games and games systems continuously update, the video game industry will continue to find the newest way to 'wow' their audience. No sooner do you get a fully animated 3D character that can perform 1000 different actions than somebody else will come out with the same thing with an added boost to visual effects. In the film industry, likewise we've seen continuous development with increasingly sophisticated effects, and this shows no signs of abating.
Knowledge Systems
While A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) is temporarily a stalled career path, the subset of A.I. which deals with finding the most efficient way to answer a question in the least amount of time is a field which will show continuing progress. For instance, recently the answer engine Wolfram Alpha made some headlines for itself. We have much farther to go.
Streaming Media
Consider that we still don't have real-time video 'phones like they did in "Blade Runner!" What's the hold-up? Media on the web has seen an explosion in popularity in the recent decade, so this field still has some growing up to do. There's a fortune waiting for the first person who comes up with a way to deliver video and audio without buffering, downloading, needing a web browser plug-in, or having to worry about hardware compatibility.
Biology and Genetics Software
The field that shows the most future possible progress. As the medical field makes further research into genetics, stem cells, cloning, and DNA tinkering, they're finding computers to be an indispensable aide in lab work. Already a whole cottage industry has sprung up around software for biologists - and it's just getting started!
Filed Under: Education in Technology • Jobs in Technology
