Career Path for College Graduates in IT Industry

CS college graduates are having a bright future. Not only do traditional software engineering still booming, but new and more intellectually interesting areas are emerging. In the period of the next 15 years, 3 areas are already or becoming very promising in the private sector: Software engineering, Data Science and Internet of Things.
To survive in the constantly changing Software industry, college graduates are expected to have the following skill sets: web development and framework like HTML5 & Ruby on Rails to get jobs from small companies and startups; enterprise softwares like J2EE, ASP.net. To climb the ladder in a large company or to be hired as an experienced head of engineer in a small company, we need experience and understanding of either high-level software architecture (for an evolving one: cloud infrastructure) or lower-level details of computer architecture like OS, network protocols and so on.
IOT is promised to be a trillion-dollar industry. However as the big firms and the government largely dominate it, available jobs for international students in US will not be as many as that of Software. Many Electrical Engineering students are thrilled about the growth of IOT because they think there will be a second spring of EE. Nevertheless, the opportunities and money streams in IOT are mostly in the fog network, cloud computing and big data analysis, instead of hardware manufacture. This is because in today’s economy, the companies using tools to solve a problem for customers are usually more influential and valued than “tool providers”. So, to strive in IOT, the best thing to study is in fact Software and Computational Science. In terms of EE, courses about Control and communication and embedded system will be more applicable than those about analog or digital circuit. To make IOT beneficial to people, we need people who can implement gadgets (embedded system expert) and people who can smartly design the system and get intelligent information from the millions of sensors (system architect and data scientist?).
Data Science only evolves very recently but is already booming like the Internet in the 90’s and are considered cool and valuable by many people. Essentially, Internet connects people, but data science brings intelligence and arranges resources more efficiently. Unlike IOT, which will be dominated by industry giants; data science will provide both opportunities for startups to strive and large old firms to redeem themselves. Data science will impact every industry: from finance, marketing, consulting to pharmacy. The key skill-sets are software engineering and computational science (Bayesian statistics and machine learning are the mostly used ones, but other applied math about statistics, networks, optimization are also used). To deal with large dataset (1 petabyte), distributed computing languages like Hadoop, and Spark is a must; the Cloud and Data-warehousing are involved here. For career path, the entry-level consists of data analysts who are college graduates who understand a bit about statistics and can write software as well; the higher level consists of Data scientists who are either PHD of machine learning or experienced data analyst. Eventually, people with domain knowledge will enter this industry, but developing the software which implements those intelligent algorithms will always be the bread and butter. To get a good career, you can either join a promising startup to get stock share or join the data science department of big firms (these departments are usually new and still expanding).
Of course, some other cool gadgets are evolving like: virtual reality, augmented reality, brain computer interface, and implanted medical device… There is no specific word to summarize them, but it is proper to call them: new hardware. They are usually created by innovative startups and some special apartments of big firms like GoogleX. The opportunities available are smaller than the previous 3, but for hackers and geeks, these are the areas worth a try. They are challenging and involves hard-core technology like Computer graphics, machine vision, miniaturized hardware and so on… This is the area for really talented people… Also transferring to finance industry is always an option, hedge funds are looking for solid programmer who are also sophisticated about math; also if you can write trading algorithm to beat S&P500 index… Still if you are smart and prepared…