Touching Base

As we are fast approaching the holidays, Graduate Nation wish all of you Holidays!
A New Year always advents with new hopes, possibilities and opportunities. May you strive and shine brighter in your journey of achieving the goals.

We will soon start updating the blogs with the happenings and opportunities in Graduate Nation.

Hiring Season 2017

Hiring season of 2017 is off to a great start.

There has been major shift in job opportunities and also candidates' interest in technologies, especially with fresh Graduate students. The developing story of business taking a driver's seat in technology decisions is reflecting on how the students would like to align to the new blocks.

The areas of focus are dynamic programming such as Python and Ruby, Data Science, Big Data and Analytics. Others include digital technologies, Frontend technologies and CRM ~ SalesForce.Com and Microsoft Dynamics.

We will be updating the progress in detail, soon. This will also have a roundup on the spring career fair from across the country.

Colossal Career Prospects in Smart Grid for Graduate Students

Ever since initiatives for Power saving, Virtual Power Plant and Smart Grid gained momentum from 2007-08, growth in career opportunities also grew substantially in Energy and Utilities industry for Engineering, Networking and Information Technology professionals. This in line with efforts to boost alternate energy sources increased the volume of operations in this industry with non-traditional activities.

Cost of having a Smart Grid is projected to be $3 / month / customer to a utility provider. This can be part of Operational expenditure (CAPEX) for business with flexibility in accounting. It is not much when compared to the costs saved in optimal energy consumption. Infrastructure investments are made as capital expenditures (CAPEX) which is laid for long term and with flexible tax options.  Many states like New Jersey, North Carolina and California welcomed this new initiative with millions of consumers subscribing to this.

For those who are new to this, let us take a quick look at this opportunity.

·   This involves installing smart meters / devices at each consumer's home / business, transmitting signals through wireless enabled systems (like Zigbee) to a central database. Such data signals are then cleaned, sorted and arranged to be made available through a web or mobile based program (JAVA, Android/iOS etc.) to each customer who would be enabled to create individual accounts just like the way a bank does for their customers. 

·    Each consumer would be able to remotely operate such utility services / devices such as power at their home / business. How cool it would be turn on your air conditioner at home from your mobile while you are still at work and couple hours before you reach home on a hot summer day, Right? Yes, this is no longer a fantasy. This is real with Smart Grid and Smart Meters today.

So, here are the opportunities for different professionals:

·   Manufacturing, Engineering, Installing and Testing the devices and equipment - this would be the opportunities for those from mechanical and electrical engineering.

·     Laying out wireless networks and devices with all networking standards and security - this would go to the networking and information security professionals

·    Cleaning the signal data, sorting it, arranging and pushing to web / mobile applications - Database administrators or Data Warehousing professionals would do this job.

·     Application design, development and testing - This would give great opportunities for Engineers from Computer Science and Computer Engineering. Mobile developers also would have great opportunity in this part of the integration.

Oracle is getting big in to this with Java ME. Microsoft also is big in this space with .NET Micro frame work. A more fundamental reason is that embedded hardware has become powerful to the point of running Java and .NET. Feel free to use your imagination to project the opportunities that are going to be generated!

Above depicts only the information management part of it. Lot of functional expertise and subject matter experts also would be required to input several ideas to make this happen.

With the growing trends and internet of things, Applications are cloud enabled now. We also hear about BigData. This is an advent of another huge opportunity wave. 

If we look closer on the above discussed opportunities, many of these jobs can be performed by fresh Graduate Students with proper training and mentoring. This involves several cutting edge technologies which they have been dreaming to get in to or would have heard recommendations from their Professors.

Having executed few successful projects in Smart Grid Demand Response and trained several Graduate Students, it is our thinking that opportunities are growing day by day in Energy and Utilities which may be worth pursuing. This wave of things has just begun in North American and some parts of Far East Asia. Global opportunity calls of thousands of qualified talents in the years to come when we see our whole planet deploys this!