As Gartner predicts, there will be 20 billion Internet of Things devices by 2020. Such intense IoT-ization will require the talent of IoT developers with the relevant set of skills to power these devices with functional software. So if you are thinking about starting a career as an IoT engineer but are not sure about what technical skills you should hone, carry on reading — in this article, we’ve gathered top skills that are and will continue to be in high demand on the IoT market.
The complexity of IoT systems determines the diversity of skills required for development. Corresponding to the number of layers in a typical IoT architecture, there are five key areas of expertise:
Endpoint IoT devices combine hardware and software components. With processors being integrated into everything from a toaster to an industrial machine, there is an increasing demand for developers of embedded software. An engineer should be able to create an embedded software that deals with unreliable data (consider sensor drifts) and works correctly in an uncontrolled physical environment.
Since IoT devices usually have limited computing resources, the language of choice for embedded software development is C. It is lightweight, does not require much processing power, ensures fast performance and is suitable for writing low-level code.
However, as C does not have object-oriented capabilities, C++ is usually used as a preprocessor for it. Recently, other languages, like Java SE Embedded, Java ME Embedded, have become more popular with embedded engineers.
Another asset important for embedded software development is experience with GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) and I2C ((Inter-Integrated Circuit — pronounced I-squared-C) interfaces, which are used to establish communication between a micro-controller and a connected device.
Field gateways serve as a link between IoT devices and the cloud part of an IoT system. Their task is to acquire data from connected devices, filter and preprocess this data, and send it to the cloud for further processing and storage. The code running on field gateways is usually written in C or C++.
IoT companies are open to hiring professionals who have experience in working with cloud computing technologies and can design, implement, and maintain reliable and scalable data management solutions for handling intense volumes of streaming IoT data. The tasks an engineer should be able to carry out in order to build this layer include:
IoT devices generate enormous amounts of data. At the data ingestion stage, the data is prioritized and categorized, which makes it flow smoothly to the subsequent components of an IoT system: a streaming data processor and a data lake. Data ingestion is usually carried out with such tools as Azure Event Hubs, Apache Kafka, and Amazon Kinesis, which require the knowledge of Java, Python, and .NET.
The data streaming component allows processing an array of incoming data records as they arrive and instantly taking a corresponding output action. Data streaming is carried out with the help of such tools as Azure Stream Analytics that uses an SQL-like query language, and Spark Streaming that supports Java, SCALA, and Python.
The data storage component handles the storage and organization of data.
