Sales Engineering – Is This the Next Place to Be?
A study of 1.7 million job openings found that eight of these 10 skill areas were already requested in over 30% of occupations. Certainly there is more demand for technology in these areas. Accordingly, the question then becomes – will these be the next area of demand for Sales Engineers to specialize in? First, let’s review the technologies:
- Quantum computing
- Connected technologies (IoT)
- Fintech
- AI and machine learning (ML)
- IT automation
- Natural language processing (NLP)
- Proactive security
- Software development methodologies (Agile and DevOps)
- Cloud
- Parallel computing
How would you discover if these are the next big areas new SEs should be looking into? When I was working on my Job Aggregator project, I would have created buckets for these technologies. Plotted their growth over time. Who knows, perhaps it is time to dust off those servers, boot them up, and modify the algorithms.
If you want some data to tinker with, check out the 2000+ lines I manually copied out of San Francisco Sales Engineer roles. If you use LinkedIn’s APIs, the TOU (Terms Of Use) doesn’t allow you to store the data beyond a certain period of time. You’ll want to label each entry for supervised learning in your model. There are some nested samples that need to be refined. At some point I’ll annotate and clean.