Wireless Career Prospects

The future is wireless. Wireless and mobile technologies are here to stay, metamorphosizing the way people live and work by making things more simple, convenient, and efficient. They have already commenced demonstrating their power and potential to be all pervasive and deeply woven into our personal and professional lives.

Mobility is challenging the traditional concepts of employee, workplace, company, industry, territory and market. Mobility is realigning customers by similarity and interests, and no longer by location. Mobility is taking personalized data to a new level by recognizing the ever-changing, context-specific location of a customer. Wireless always-on internet infrastructure is becoming the building block that will enable tomorrow's mobile, connected society to function.
Eventually anything with a microchip can, and will, become intelligent and connected. Coupled with the increasing ability to digitally deliver services, ultimately all of these connected tools will serve as platforms for the delivery of internet-based services, mobile technology infrastructure and e-commerce. Trillions of dollars is going to be pumped worldwide over the next decade, into an always-on internet infrastructure, the information grid that will make access to internet-based information and services as pervasive as access to other utility-based services, such as electricity or water.

Fifty billion wireless devices such as smart phones, PDAs and other mobile computing tools are expected to be in consumers' hands by 2020, according to research from IDC, an industry trends analysis firm. Mobile devices such as phones, handhelds and notebooks, together with the right groupware application is allowing anyone, regardless of profession, to communicate, work and/or study anywhere anytime via wireless network. This is the empowerment of users through the powerful convergence of technologies—putting the world into the hands of the individuals. The movement towards always-on, service-centric computing and mobile devices is already radically affecting how and where work is done.


Undoubtedly a wireless strategy is now an absolute necessity for every organization. Businesses today recognize that they need a wireless component to their business and that eventually everyone will have one. Businesses today realize that as their customers become aware of the ease and capabilities of the mobile, service-centric lifestyle, they will not be able to remain wireless-dinosaurs and still thrive in the coming marketplace. All it takes is one company in an industry to catch on to the power and potential that lies at the intersection of information appliances, e-services and an always-on internet infrastructure and they can become the tipping point for their entire industry — transforming business as usual.

Naturally businesses are increasingly focusing on how they can leverage their existing resources, to work towards a wireless enablement solution for today, which will lay the groundwork to tomorrow's mobile future and the capabilities it will usher in. Gradually more and more companies are equipping a large part of their work force with small wirelessly-enabled devices that allow employees to read and update critical enterprise data. The existing wireless technologies is enabling even small to medium companies to act on their mobility strategy using their operating budgets, without having to make a huge investment.

Wireless and mobile technologies are already making customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and knowledge management (KM), more simpler and effective than ever. The vast adoption of wireless technology has created prime opportunities for businesses to better serve customers by offering value-added mobile services and wireless access to business functions, while at the same time providing businesses with ways to improve internal business procedures by providing remote access to core business information and operational functions. The opportunities to grow revenue, cut costs and build personalized customer relationships are just beginning to be tapped by enterprise leaders, strategists and visionaries, realizing that mobility strategies need to be in the forefront for a company to profit and succeed in today's market.

This opportunity has in turn created a growing demand for technical professionals with appropriate educational background and skills to help develop, engineer, deploy, maintain, and operate these systems. As this growth continues to accelerate, industry is experiencing great difficulty in attracting and retaining qualified professionals.


Managing the wireless infrastructure, involves managing both the wired as well as mobile components that go into a wireless network. The wired components include servers, desktops, and access points that need to be monitored. On the wireless component side, there are variety of mobile devices trying to connect to the enterprise to access data. This makes it absolutely necessary to secure, manage and optimize these devices. Anywhere, anytime access needs to be built on a secure platform, driving demand for professionals working on security protocols.

Also enterprises cannot discard what they already have in terms of enterprise applications. So the need is to wireless-enable existing applications, or develop new applications that work seamlessly with existing applications that are meant to run on a wired infrastructure.

There is also a need to ensure that the applications are tuned to take care of the individual capability of each mobile device. The interface between the mobile device and the server need to be smart enough to take care of different devices. The fact is, there has never been a better time to start a career in this rapidly growing industry.