Insight

Here’s why you should consider a career in IoT

The world today is highly interconnected and quickly becoming smarter, with a rapidly growing demand for Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.

IoT has the potential to solve complex business challenges, offering innovative ways to simplify, improve and automate processes, and vast amounts of value-adding data. It’s an ideal career path for anyone looking to get into tech.

What is IoT?

The Internet of Things refers to physical devices connected to the internet, all collecting and sharing data. The IoT relies on sensors and data analytics to inform machine learning and decision-making, creating fascinating applications, such as tracking when people fall over or creating digital twins of physical machinery. What makes IoT different from many other systems is the real-time data it provides, which cuts the time it takes to act, minimises risks and helps businesses understand customer behaviours.

You can think about IoT in terms of four domains, each requiring different skills and demands:

  1. Physical devices and integration – Focuses on connected devices and deals with network RFID bandwidth and frequency spectrums for each device.
  2. Data processing – Focuses on making sense of the data gathered from devices, combining different sources of information into something useful and feeding this into analytics.
  3. Analytics and action – Focuses on spotting patterns in the data and acting on those observations, which involves machine learning and other AI and data science skills.
  4. Infrastructure definition – Focuses on underpinning the other three domains, giving a clear end-to-end view of how to put an IoT project together.

Why does IoT matter?

The range of IoT applications are huge, from pollution monitoring and the development of smart cities to digital healthcare.

The number and quality of sensors and data systems keep increasing, meaning IoT devices can collect growing amounts of data on many different areas. Research shows that by 2023 there will be 29.3 billion connected devices, creating vast opportunities for innovation in the IoT domain. As IoT devices become more widely available, cost-effectiveness will enable new applications and large-scale monitoring. Career wise, this is an exciting opportunity to shape the future by applying innovative IoT technologies to solve real world problems across industries.

How can working in IoT help build a positive human future?

Technology has the potential to answer many of the world’s toughest challenges, but it takes human ingenuity to unleash it. It’s an exciting time to be in IoT, with huge opportunities to transform multiple sectors.

For example, we helped Drayson Technologies save lives by empowering communities to tackle air pollution. They conceived a portable personal air pollution sensor and app that gives you real-time personal data on your exposure and motivates you to choose non-polluting transport choices for rewards. Drayson approached PA to help them get CleanSpace™ to market as quickly as possible, providing the technology expertise to design and develop the solution, creating a network of sensors using a cloud-based platform to provide the world’s most accurate real-time map of air pollution.

IoT is transforming industries by redefining people’s interactions with devices. Organisations need support to unlock the opportunities, making now the ideal time to embark on a career in the Internet of Things.

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