Experts Weigh in on Jobs, Skills of the Future

What skills will be needed in your data and analytics job in 5 or 10 years? A panel of experts tackled that question at Interop ITX. Here's what they said. If you want to know where all the hype is in the industry right now, ask experts where the jobs will be in 5 or 10 years. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality. The jobs question is one that everyone wants an answer to right now as they examine whether their current jobs may be automated in the future. But there's no real clear absolute answer about where the jobs will be because no one really knows. Compare this point in time to the 1990s when the Internet was just getting started as something that was used by non-tech people. "Everybody knew at that time that the internet in its first incarnation was slow and clunky, but everyone knew it would change everything," said James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research.  "But no one knew the ways it would change it." The 1990s Internet is comparable to where we are right now with AI, machine learning, and other related technologies, according to McCaffrey, who served on a panel at Interop ITX, May 3, The Future of Data Jobs: Innovation, Security, Automation, and the Cloud. McCaffrey said that by the time your children are your age, the world will be beyond recognizable, and the jobs of today will be eliminated. But for today, there are some practical considerations if you are looking to protect your career and get it ready for the next 5 to 10 years. Genetha Gray, a data scientist at Intel, said that her company tries to focus on skills rather than jobs. "As jobs change and you need new skills, who are the people who we can up-skill the fastest?" she said. The simplest example of this is with programming languages, she said. You may be an expert in one type of programming that makes it likely that you will have an easier time learning another type of programming, she said.