Technology Sectors that are Hot or Heating Up Now?

unemployedCoder-in-retraining asks: "As a recently "leisured" programmer, I'm very interested in trying to turn misfortune into opportunity. This means using this career discontinuity to bone up on the latest-n-greatest in the hot sectors of the industry, to offer a better chance of a finding another great job. Of course, then one asks: 'What's Hot?' The Telco/Switching sector seems to have flatlined (Nortel and Lucent as examples). Cable and DSL access device and service development seems to be struggling. Wireless 3G networks seem to be having a hard time in North America. And yet, we here that a recovery is underway and that the technology sector as a whole is picking up again. So I ask you: 'Where?' In what sectors? What are the most important new technologies to learn to enhance employability? Somewhere, somebody is hiring or will be soon. What do I and other victims of the slowdown have to know to 'get back in the saddle' in the near future?"

Comments

Re:Bio-informatics

[Paul Johnson]

Biotech is increasingly an IT-intensive industry. Some of the biggest iron in the world exists to crunch biotech problems, mostly related to protein folding and drug interactions. They also generate huge amounts of experimental data that has to be managed and mined. Finally there is a lot of automated lab equipment for parallelising those bits of it that still involve real chemicals and real biology.

The field here is wide open. Lots of university biology departments are spinning off companies to make innovative new sensors, so you can get involved there. Or you can go and manage a Beowulf cluster for a big drug firm. Or anything in between.

Paul.