12 emerging IT job titles with a bright future

When you see an IT trend with staying power, you can expect new job titles and roles to follow. Take cloud computing: Today, titles like “cloud architect” or “cloud engineer” (and many variations thereof) abound on the IT job market. 10 years ago? Not so much.

So it shouldn’t stop you in your tracks that many of today’s emerging IT job titles – and the related responsibilities – connect to some of the most-hyped technologies and trends. Think IoT, machine learning, data analysis, and more.

You could argue that some “new” job titles aren’t particularly creative, including the aforementioned cloud examples. We’re just fusing “major trend” with “traditional job title,” as in the case of the rapidly proliferating “DevOps Engineer” moniker. (And that title makes our list below, highlighting the debates that spring up around defining new roles.)

The formula for coming up with new IT titles is straightforward enough, but it potentially misses some of the point. These days, emerging IT job titles don’t just represent emerging technologies; they signal fundamental shifts in the nature of IT – especially its evolution from service-and-support organization to business leader.

New and forward-looking job titles in IT also, in some cases, reflect the blurring lines between roles once neatly defined by discrete departments in an organization (AI lawyer, anyone?). The notion that, say, IT and marketing are wholly separate business functions is passé.

“IT organizations will need to be much more fluid in how they operate, with self-organizing autonomous teams coming together to solve specific business problems,” says Mark Hill, CIO at recruiting firm Mason Frank International. “This will take a new breed of IT person who is much more business-focused…and thrives on almost constant change.”

Witness some nascent job titles, such as “API product manager,” which came up for discussion at the recent Gartner CIO Symposium. API product manager is a good example of all of the above: It fuses a significant technology with a traditional job title, one that’s traditionally more of a business role than an IT function. But it also represents the digital age in which we live and work: Increasingly, the technology is the product, and APIs are a crucial connective tissue in our increasingly cloud-first world, especially as microservices and containers spread.

So what does the next wave hold for IT jobs? Read on for insights and predictions from a wide range of technology and business leaders on important IT titles of the near future.

This is one of the top two emerging IT titles, according to recruiting firm Mondo, based on 2017 placement data in its 11 primary U.S. regions.

“Machine learning is a growing, in-demand skill set that companies are beginning to hire for as they realize more fully the potential AI-driven tech that functions semi-autonomously provides and start to invest more resources into AI functionality, specifically for machine learning needs,” says Stephen Zafarino, Mondo’s senior director of recruiting.

You’ll find a bunch of variations of this title that reflect the growing role of machine learning in a wide range of businesses and industries, such as “machine trainer,” “machine tutor,” “machine tester,” and “machine learning expert.”

It’s also an area that overlaps other increasingly crucial roles and business drivers, such as data analytics.

“Machine learning is still a misunderstood concept, but it is increasingly  important in everything from finance to social media,” says Lucy Wei, head of talent at AxiomZen. “There’s an overabundance of data and machine learning is how that data is practically employed and learned from; it combines experience with statistical data to develop [business] uses.”

“IoT architect” is the other top title and field based on Mondo’s placement data.