Glassdoor, the popular website where employees and former employees review companies and their management anonymously, recently released its list of “25 Best Jobs in America for 2016.” How do they determine what’s “best?” By weighing earning potential, career opportunities, and the number of current job openings.
Given the extremely tight IT job market today, it’s no surprise that 40 percent of the best 25 jobs are in IT. Here are three of our favorites, and some Enterprisers who work closely with these valuable hires.
Data Scientist (#1 on the list). Tom Soderstrom, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Office of the CIO at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, describes the power a great data scientist can bring to a huge amount of data. His data scientist Rob Witoff quickly leveraged the insights from a trend visualization about hiring at JPL to better manage trouble reports on the Mars Exploration Rover project. His work led to a concept JPL calls question farming, “and our IT Data Scientist is an awesome farmer.”
Mobile Developer (#3 on the list). Marc Frons, former senior vice president and chief information officer of The New York Times, has been fully committed to making the Times a mobile-first company, and has been directly involved in filling the ranks of the organization with great mobile development talent. In this article, he shares stories from that journey, including some words of advice: Is your IT group just starting out in mobile? Here's one way to look at it. If you’ve got 30 engineers on the web and three on mobile, you’ve got to even that balance out quite a bit. If you’re spending 80 percent of your money on desktop and 20 percent on mobile, it should probably be 50/50 at least, if not tilting the balance toward mobile just in terms of playing catchup. Remember that mobile is a push medium, that notifications have become crucial for driving traffic – reminding people that you’re there, stimulating awareness and encouraging usage.”
Analytics Manager (#6 on the list). Philip Garland, Partner and CIO at PwC, sees analytics on a continuum that includes many of the most valuable skills in the future of IT. As he notes in an interview excerpt, “We all grew up building and implementing big infrastructure and applications, gathering business requirements, and building systems to automate processes. Today, with the progress we see in deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience, and physics, we are creating new, instant analysis platforms with really truly remarkable capabilities. And I think that it’s really a great career opportunity for people who can leverage that into work life and real life.”
To see all the IT jobs that made the list, check out this great slideshow from CIO.com.
