The Top Three hottest new majors for a career in technology

Posted Aug 19 2010 11:21 AM by Eugenia Sawa

EugeniaHave you ever wondered what fields of study are hot right now in the world of technology?  Or maybe you’re starting to think about declaring your major and you’re looking for some real world guidance?

It is worth thinking beyond a traditional Computer Science degree or even an Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) program. Microsoft is hiring people with unique backgrounds, some that are new with the inception of the Cloud, web services and the amazing scale at which the industry is operating (Exabyte anyone?).

The following is my list of the Top Three hottest academic areas for a future career in tech:

Data Mining/Machine Learning/AI/Natural Language Processing 
All of these fields help us sift through and organize huge amounts of information or data. When you apply your knowledge in these areas to a challenging problem in the online space, you know that you are working at a scale that is just immense.  It’s much easier said than done.  If you have a passion for this area and have a technical background there are a multitude of open positions that might hold a long-term career for you.  With the move to the cloud and the sheer amount of information on the web, this area of expertise will continue to be in great demand. Microsoft has a great need for both people interested in the research space and the applied space which is very refreshing.

Business Intelligence/Competitive Intelligence
The ability to see trends, make sense of data to a business audience and help to understand your customers requires a special person. Someone with a mix of engineering, BI/CI experience and a business mindset can take this field to the next level. You will help increase any employer’s bottom line and be able to provide organized data that is extremely valuable to any business. You can help drive business decisions and help your internal audience understand what the data is telling or showing you. 

Analytics/Statistics – specifically Web Analytics, A/B Testing and statistical analysis
All of these subjects are offshoots of traditional degrees in CS and mathematics. They all apply to the online world we live in and will also be in great demand as we continue to monetize the web. Retailers, web services, and advertisers will need people in these fields as they try to get the most for their advertising money. As we continue to see the dollar amounts spent for online advertising worldwide, these fields will be hot and we will see online advertising change over time as a result of these positions. 

If these fields interest you and you want to find out what some of these jobs really entail, visit our website and search on the terms above to get a more detailed look at the positions. These fields are very HOT and looking long term, the demand will be just that much greater in these areas.

Work at Microsoft!

19 Comments

  • Ant said:

    Agree these skills are hot today, and the 'data tsunami' is here to stay, but anyone selecting a major today will be entering the job market sometime around 2014-15. By then a lot of this will be played through and the data science areas that deliver real value will be totally automated. I'd have thought bigger themes like renewable energy, transportation, robotics, AR and next gen design skills would be every bit as valuable as the same core set of maths/stats/machine learning that would underpin the 3 areas above.

  • Eugenia said:

    Hi Ant, thanks for your comment. Absolutely transportation, robotics, and renewable energy are all fields that are important to the future. This is just a piece of the landscape we call the future and what as recruiters we see for the next few years to come. To a passionate tester, nothing can truly be 100% automated to catch everything but I understand your sentiment. Thank you for reading our blog and for your valuable feedback.

  • Sumeet said:

    Hello, What would you suggest to students having computer science background with experience in IT service industry and currently pursuing MBA in US?

    What are the areas in Microsoft, or technology industry in general that you see picking up in the near future? I am a techie at heart, so would love to hear your perspective about tech related careers.

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  • Bob Smith said:

    Ah, these are indeed valuable skills, but someone has to write the tools these people use! :)

  • An said:

    Um a lot use existing tools like SAS or SPSS which include languages as well. I agree with Ant that the trend will top out soon due to automation, pushing salaries and skills down. Look at Google Analytics and the sea of weenies claiming to do analysis that is just reporting.

  • Matt said:

    Ant and An,

    I disagree about the concern with automation. Automation will expand, but machine learning, statistical, and AI techniques will be making that happen. I have a CS and machine learning background and after earning a MS in CS I'm actually switching departments to study computational statistics because I want a deeper understanding of statistical theory which can then be applied to machine learning.

    Maybe you both are only considering analysis?

  • Vincent Granville said:

    If this article represents Microsoft's viewpoint, it could be biased. Microsoft is very much into A/B testing with Bing.com, but this all A/B testing stuff is more than 100 years old, and Microsoft came late in the game, well after Google and Yahoo.

    If the economy is not improving, one area that could see strong job growth is fraud / crime / terrorism early detection and in real time, which requires automated data mining tools, expert statistical knowledge and ad-hoc analyses to identify constantly evolving fraud patterns and train models. Also, resource optimization (e.g. water management, doing more, feeding more people with less money, fewer resources): here inventory management, forecasting, actuarial science are good analytic skills to have.

  • Sk said:

    I am a Masters student in Computer Science and I have an onsite interview scheduled at Microsoft next month for SDET.

    I do not know Linked Lists /Stacks ,Queues ,Algorithms .. as I did not study them in my undergrad(I was not a CS major). but Should I tell my interviewers upfront about this ? I am learning these data structures now ...

    If you are wondering how I got through the phone interview ..my interviewer asked me a question based on arrays /strings.

  • Alexander said:

    Whatever you do, whatever is your degree, if you are the best in your field you will be demanded 5 and 10 years later. Just DO NOT GET RELAXED! Study, improve yourself, study again. Traditional SDEs and SDETs will be demanded in years the same as they are demanded today because somebody has to do this kind of job. I agree that AI stuff age getting more popular but in future it will be another field because someone who is an expert in machine learning would not spend his precious time for taming windows and protocols or hunting bugs, he will be busy with machine learning stuff, and we - devs - will be working on what we are used to. The only difference will be the perception of the devs work. I mean, if 20 years ago we were staying on the same level with scientists, nowadays any smart and diligent guy may bring uo a good dev inside him, so 10-20 years later we will be a working-class :) Cheers!

  • John Thorr said:

    Thank you for the advice. About 7 months ago I was laid off from my job and I have been doing little bits of work here and there to get by, but I’m starting to get financially unstable and I need to do something to improve my situation fast. In my opinion, and based on feedback from recruiters, my resume needs to be written by a professional to really bring out my skills. So I’ve spent the past few weeks reading about <a href="http://www.resume-service-inc.com">resume services</a> and trying to pick the best one. I’ve found a few <a href="http://www.compare-resume-services.com/resume-services.html">resume service review</a> sites, which are helpful, but most of them say the same thing and have similar prices and guarantees. Can anyone please recommend a resume writing service to me, or maybe somewhere I can search for jobs? Thanks in advance.

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  • Tal Galili said:

    Bob,

    Today, statisticians are mostly statistical <strong>programmers</strong>, doing their analysis using a programming language as their tool (like R, matlab, python, perl and so on), therefor - they mostly write their own code...

  • Corinne said:

    While these may be popular, they aren't necessarily absolute for non-dev/test roles. I came in with a very unrelated background in Biomedical Engineering and am finding that I really enjoy working as a Program Manager at Microsoft! I see just the right mix of engineering/computer science, business knowledge, relationship management, etc.

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