Technology Career Streams
‘Technology’ is a vast field and offers many interesting and fun careers to people with all kinds of talents and educational backgrounds. You dont have to be good at maths and science to join this exciting and growing field. There is place for almost every one - as long as you are fascinated by how Technology changes the world and want to be a contributor to that change.
This post briefly describes the major categories or areas within Technology. Subsequent posts will elaborate on each of them, with the hope that it will help some of the readers select the category that matches their aptitude, talent and educational background.
To start with, by ‘Technology’ I mean ‘Information Technology’ which is technology related to the computer or internet world. At the high level, as you probably know, there are two broad areas:
a) Hardware, which deals with building equipment that you can physically touch and feel, like computers, storage devices, web cams etc.
b) Software, which is a set of instructions to the computers to perform some logic or so some processing of information. Software is mostly created by typing on a computer in a language that computers can understand, like Java, C/C++, PHP etc.
I’ll start with Software, because that is the area I know well, having spent over 25 years developing software applications. Following are the main areas within Software:
- Software development or software engineering, which is the main area and employs the largest number of people. Software developer or engineers, also called programmers, write computer programs in languages like Java, C/C++, PHP and many others.
- QA or testing, which involves testing of software programs or applications.
- System Administration, which involves managing computers, large and small, to make sure they keep working well.
- Networking, which involves creating and managing networks or cluster of computers to handle sharing of computer resources and large volumes of traffic.
- Data administration, which focusses on quality and speed of delivery while capturing/storing as well as distributing/displaying data.
- Help Desk and technical support, which helps users of computers and software make the best use of their resources
- Design and User Interface, focussing on making software applications visually attractive and easy to use.
- Technical Writing, to write user manuals and online help, FAQ, tutorials etc, to make it easy for users to get the best from a software application.
In subsequent posts, I’ll write more about each of these areas.
