10 HOT careers for IT grads

Engineering graduates specialising in artificial intelligence and machine learning can earn up to ₹24 lakh a year, says Saran Balasundaram, founder and CEO, HanDigital, a talent consulting firm.

The Indian IT-BPM (Information Technology-Business Process Management) market is revived at full pace of hiring since January 2021.

There is significant hiring we expect on digital technology roles from graduate hiring to manage shortage of skilled talent in the market.

Companies are building fresh graduates for future ready roles and skills which are expected to be remain high.

1. Python Developer

Python developer is one among the largest number of job openings available India with 10,000+ in any financial month with the driving demand from high level application development, data engineering, machine learning and digital engineering space.

Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, information technology and mathematics are the need for Python.

A strong python developer role will gain upto ₹12 lakh per annum compensation at entry level.

2. Cyber Security Engineer

Surge in cyber crimes increased more than 35% in the last 10 years in India.

Business sectors such as banking and financials, telecom, e-commerce, healthcare/pharma, software/Internet, etc are more vulnerable these days.

Post pandemic impact, now trillions of transactions and day to day workflow dependency created over internet, many times seems vulnerable and not safe.

The demand of InfoSec/Cyber security will continue to grow without any speed-breaker across data security, cloud security, network security, privileged identity, and access management, SIEM, data center/server security, end point security, etc.

Certifications such as Certified Information Systems Security (CISSP), Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) will get more preference with at least 30% higher market median upto ₹14 lakh per annum.

3. Digital Marketing Automation Engineer

Digital marketing automation is becoming a powerful marketing strategy that helps any business increase their sales, lead generation, save time, analyse sales results, and further improve business strategy.

Tools such as Adobe Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, HCL Unica, Salesforce marketing cloud are the leaders in this field with high demand low supply talent in IT-BPM market.

Predominant IT services companies and digital agencies are looking to attract and build these skills in India. Companies are paying upto ₹9 lakh per annum if you have the necessary skills.

4. Artificial Intelligence/ML Engineer

Market adoption and innovation on AI is increasingly very high day by day in numerous use case on AI/Ml and deep learning such as search engines, autonomous driving, online translators, virtual assistants, medical diagnosis, front desk bots, numerous marketing, and sales decisions, etc.

This results job demand increased more than 70% across global countries and one who learn or study machine learning is the best choice for high paid job in any county.

As we see, software product captives and established start-ups are building strong AI and deep learning practice in India, where they couldn’t find right talent from universities pass outs.

Graduates from premium institutes are offered upto ₹24 lakh per annum while those from tier I institutes attract ₹15 lakh per annum in India.

5. IoT Engineer

Market prediction states that, more than 25 billion devices connected over internet/IoT, which brings billions of IoT software applications, connected hardware’s and sensors.

Communication engineers, information systems and computer science engineers are in very high demand for the IoT front.

Product engineering players and Innovation centers are in the need of these graduates to come with subject knowledge.

ThingworX, Azure IoT, IBM Watson IoT, Arduino opensource and any IoT security tools  are the one you may need to study/get trained any open source IoT platforms.

This job can yield upto ₹12 lakh per annum for professionals with good subject knowledge.

6. Data Scientist

Data Scientists is required extremely matured statistical modelling, machine learning or deep learning methods on top of their strong data analytical tools with big data environments such as Hadoop, Spark, etc.

Data mining and data lake being core of the data science role through query languages such as SQL, Hive, Pig from databases such as MongoDB, NoSQL, Cassandra, HBase, etc.

The demand of data scientists increased more than 250% since 2015 in India.

Industry is ready to pay upto ₹18 lakh per annum to fresh graduates based on tier of institutes and education pedigree.

7. Front End Developer/UIUX Engineer

UIUX/Front End development made industry to bring up various scripting languages in the last five years.

This required strong responsive web design with HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap Framework skills along with any Java scripts such as Angular2-8, Node JS, React JS, Vue JS, D3 JS, Ember JS, etc.

Prepare yourself to get good score for any of these JavaScripts from coding test platforms such as Mettl, IKM, Codility, HackerEarth etc.

Freshers can expect upto ₹11 lakh per annum.

8. Full Stack Developer

Full-stack developer (FSD) is someone who is very familiar with both front and back end development.

The skill areas important for an FSD role are front end (HTML, CSS3, Java Scripts), server side (Python, PHP, .Net, Javascripts, etc), APIs(RestFul API, Rich UI) and SOAP/Microservices, cloud technologies (AWS/Azure), database(MySQL, NoSQL, Plsql,etc)  and basics of DevOps.

As much as 40% of the front end/UIUX developers upskilled to FSD in the last 3 years as we see 2X of demand spiked.

If you are specialised and passionate in software development, then this role can get you upto ₹15 lakh per annum.

9. Cloud Developer

Amazon web services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are in the race of moving anything and everything on cloud across SMB to enterprise markets.

One who are certified on any of these will gain more advantage. 50,000+ cloud job demand opened every year in the market, of which 30 to 40% couldn’t be fulfilled due to lack of talent supply and certified professionals.

Cloud developer compensation for entry level is ₹7 lakh per annum and it will go upto ₹14 lakh for the one certified on Google cloud.

10. DevOps Engineer

Talent search is on for DevOps since 2015 and expected to continue with high demand for the next few years as well.

More than 10,000+ DevOps jobs are available in the market in any financial quarter.

You can be a master in DevOps if you know agile concepts with Continuous Integration (CI) tools (Jenkins, TeamCity, Bamboo, etc), continuous delivery tools (Git, Buddy, AzureDevOps, Harness, XebiaLabs) and configuration management tool (Chef, SaltStack, Ansible, Puppet).

The average median compensation for the IT graduates in DevOps environment can go upto ₹9 lakh per annum