Gap Between Industry Requirement and Talent Pool
In majority of the cases, tech talent supplies often not met the employeer’s job vacancy requirement due to the expectation gap. Each talent has different background, experience, skills and mindset especially for professional hire. In other hand, freshly graduated tech talents might also have different skillsets and experience due to their previous educational or vocational background. Those factors introduces the gaps.
In the context of fresh grads job hunting, the gaps occured because of the curriculum from university is not fully aligned with industry needs. Unfortunately the gap will be widened out for talent who graduated from unranked university as employee tends to only recruit from specific universities to get the best talent out of the market.
Eventhough human can learn anywhere (thanks to the internet), the university environment will forge them differently. Top rank university has intense and competitive study environment between the students which force everyone to do their best in many aspects (test, labs, organizational, softskill, hardskill). But it doesnt mean an end of the world for someone who studied at B or C tier university.
There are various way to bring the mindset and skills from top universities student into our life
The Ultimate Human Power: Adaptation
Every human species has naturally born power called as “adaptation”. For example, in 1845, a group of british researchers set a trip to the arctic contitent (northwest passage). Their ship was stuck and ice-bound in the middle of frozen land which the death of 129 crews. In contrast, several tribes called as an “inuit” has lived for more than 500+ years in that same area where 129 researched are fr ozen to death.
How they survive and live in those extreme climate? adaptation and local knowledge. Inuit has been fully adapted and adjusted to the harsh environment. Unlike those 129 unfortunate researchers that was only relied on their thich wool clothing (which will freeze their body when they become wet ), inuit is fully adapted and master the local knowledge of arctic.
Below are some adaptaion strategy on how inuit adapt to the harsh environment of arctic
| Survival Factor | Local Knowledge | Adaptation Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Hunger | Track seal (animal) location and how to hunt it | Eat all kind of meat (even from seal) |
| Freezing Cold | Know that fur can trap heat | Wearing loose two layered fur so the body moisture can escape before freezing |
| Shelter | Know that a packed snow blocks (iglo) can trap heat and block even strong wind |
building the igloo with raised floor (to reduce the coldness) |
Above stories is an actual proof that human can adapt even in harsh condition like arctic climate and environment. Then surviving job market as IT tech undergraduate is definitely possible! (keep your heads up).
Adapting from Campus World to Industry
Campus is the mini version of the industry model. Lecturer will give assignment in form of test or projects to their students on smaller scale compared with the actual industry. However, the controlled environment of campus won’t give the actual business, organizational and sometimes political constraints which hinder the sudents to feel the actual working pressure.
In result, the fresh tech undergraduate talent might be surprised when the office politics kick in and affecting their overall deliverables quality, target and ultimately adding more pressure factor. Such condition is created because of the gap between campus and industry world. Softskill will become critical factor to surive in the actual working environment.
Apart from softskill gap, campus curriculum tends to be outdated (most universities adjust their curriculum every 4 years) which create hardskill gaps. Software engineering is rapidly growing to an extend where software developer like frontend & backend engineer become a commodities as everyone can learn programming without taking any degree.
Universities must be able to adapt and adjst their curriculum quickly especially to respond the AI disruption
Student must also aware on the disruption and find an extracurricular (outside of campus) to address the issue by starting an internship on the industry to gaining the softskill improvement and starting an opensource personal project to publicly show case their hard skiils as soon as possible. Do not wait until graduation as it will be too late.
Blindly apply an intership to random industry / company will just waste the time. Same goes for creating an opensource project for heavily commoditized area like web development will not help gaining advantages during job hunting. Smart strategy is needed. Apply only to growing industries and create an open source project that use a skills which is in high demand.
Available Role Landscape on The Industry for Tech Talent and The Demand
Software engineering industry broad which covering every aspect of information system (hardware, software, people, data and process). Common poeple view us as programmer or IT technician. But in reality, tech undergraduate has wide career options ranging from technical roles like developer until techno functional roles like project manager or SAP functionalist
Below are the available role and the impact analysis on AI disruption. High means the jobs are slowly transitioned into AI agent with less human intervention while “low” is the opporite (hard to be assigned to AI agent).
- (web) Frontend engineer - high. UI component can be easily created with the help of AI. Even a figma design can already be converted into actual working products in form of enterprise frontend framework like next/react or angular
- (web) Backend engineer - high. especially if it mostly deals with CRUD creation or integration from one IT system to another IT system.
- Mobile engineer (IOS, android, flutter, react native) - medium. There are some area where AI can’t touch yet. for example: hardware integration, multiple devices testing, devices debugging and platform API.
- Embedded system engineer - low. Very unlikely be transitioned to AI as it require deep knowledge about hardware and low level programming which has limited information from the internet.
- Infrastrucutre/DevOps - medium. Production baby sitting still require human intervention and judgement. Too risky to let AI manage the production env due to the absence of gatekeeping unlike development activity which has testing before the product release.
- Data Analyst - High. AI can easily create dashboard/chart, analyze csv, create SQL queries and slice and dices
- Data Scientist - Low to High (depend on the cases). If the the data scientist has deep domain knowledge. Its unlikely can get transitioned with AI. But if the data scientist who only has IT domain without specific industry domain, highly chance will get impacted by AI.
- AI Engineer - Low. In high demand as most of industry has been stated to emerge AI into their business process.
- Machine Learning Engineer - High. AI becomes more powerful, it can analyze datasets and create the end to end machine learning cycle.
- Data engineer - medium. Same situation with infrastructure/devops. Can’t let AI to maintain the production infrastructure for data management. too risky. But the knowledge of data engineering itself can be easily obtained via AI.
- Functional QA (manual/automated) - Very high. AI can easily create test case and run the test.
- Performance Tester - Low. Performance testing will require deep understanding of existing legacy system, integration and careful execution to avoid issues which also require specialized tools and expertise.
- Security Tester - Low. Require specialized tools and expertise as well as legacy system understanding
- Network Engineer - Low. No AI agent can interact with actual activities of network engineer (configuring IP, cabling, testing). Only the domain knowledge can be obtained from AI.
- Project manager - Low to Medium. Depending on the project or program scale. Complex program with high budget require an eperienced project manager not an AI agent. However, small scale project can be easily managed by AI agent.
- Business analyst (requirement writer) - Very high. Can easily be replaced by AI
- Business analyst (domain SME/subject matter expert) - low. The accumulated working experiences and their judgement are too deep to overshadowed by AI and will never get replaced.
- Solution Architect (end to end) - Low. AI can help to craft the solution, but the actual digital thread stiching will still need solution architect as it require a lot of offline coordination and alignment with many stakeholders.
In order to survive the job market, software engineer need to broaden their knowledge horizon. Not just masting one deep area knowledge (eg: backend development) but also understand the other area (frontend development, netwroking, infrastructure/devops, business domain knowledge and so on). In shorts, learning highly impacted area is still important.
Converging University Curriculum into Industry Needs
If university curriculum is not covering the high demand area (especially the niche area like AI or networking), it is recommended to take an extra courses outside the campus to improve the hard skills. For example, get a online video courses, subscribing into paid article/journal that align with the career plan, invest on physical books and taking related certifications.
The path to improve hardskill on IT area is crystal clear. Basically, learn more, experience more and know more from various learning media (book/video/courses/article/internship). In contrast, the harskill at functional area (local domain) is really hard to be learnt. It can only be obtained through internship and doing the actual works on specific industry.
For example, to acquire deep business domain on mining, learning from books, courses and youtube video are not enough because most of the knowledge is isolated within the business user who actually run the industry like operator, planner, engineer and supervisor.
Hence, learning hardskill is relatively easy nowdays with the help of AI and the openess of information on the internet, but the hardskill on functional area require some extra effort by directly experiencing the business process on that industry. Keep getting updated and closely monitor the opportunities to apply for internship / summer course or even land the actual job there.
