EE Job Titles of the Future
Source: Jessica Lipsky

In an ever-evolving, complex industry such as electrical engineering, specialties and necessary skill sets are bound to change. EE and computer science professors are changing the way they teach as equipment becomes less expensive, fields merge, and new needs are created.

"There seem to be more, larger interdisciplinary research programs," Tsu-Jae King Liu, EE division chair and associate chair of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at UC Berkeley, told us. "Courses tend to have research influence, so students see what they're learning is practical. We now have collaborations between technologists and computer architectures."

More applications require advancements in hardware and software engineering. Biomed and information systems are rapidly becoming more important. Liu said more software companies are hiring people with hardware experience, because software optimization requires engineering to co-opt algorithms and code within the hardware's architecture. "There is always interest to develop new types of computing devices that are more energy efficient, that can be used in a more wide range of environments, and that directly interface with humans."

Stanford University professor Mark Horowitz doesn't believe there will be "seismic changes" in curriculum based on emerging fields, but told us that EE, like other industries, will evolve over time.

"Parts that weren't the most popular start growing in importance, but things that were [popular] start to fade," said Horowitz, founder of the licensing company Rambus Inc. "We have developed amazing technology in the scaling of silicon, and what we're seeing is a blossoming of that technology in different areas."

99.99% of jobs see no change
Though inexpensive equipment has democratized learning and opened the doors for new applications, the embedded systems development expert Jack Ganssle said that 99.99% of the jobs in his field haven't changed.

"There are some new ones like 'IoT Visionary,' 'IoT Ambassador,' and the like but… I have no doubt those titles won't last more than a couple of years," he said. "To be successful, a pro will have to have a deep understanding of the hardware and software. The app-like crowd excels in abstraction, in getting stuff done with just a facile knowledge of their systems."

Major companies are split on the skill sets necessary for newly hired electrical engineers, Ganssle said. "One wants specific skills and searches resumes for acronyms. Others, like Google, want smart people who can innovate, and they care less about experience and titles."

Horowitz said the ability to "take things apart both figuratively and literally, use constraints, and work in a team" will be very important in securing an engineering job. Students will also need to know programming and problem decomposition and have mathematical skills to leverage computing tools.

Officials from the semiconductor manufacturing company Intersil told us in an email that future electrical engineers should be well rounded. Recent graduates should be hungry to learn and have a variety of skills, and not just high marks in engineering courses.

"In recent graduates, we are looking for those that… have variety of skills that include people and communications skills," the officials wrote. "In experienced people, we are looking for the ability to innovate. We look for leaders that are excited by the challenge of finding new ways to solve problems. They are willing to take calculated risks and have a track record of executing well."

Enrollment decline
Still, Liu said enrollment in electrical engineering programs has declined over the past several years. Students have failed to understand the wide range of job opportunities in computing and information science. Enrollment may increase at schools with an integrated EE and computer science department -- like Cal Berkeley, MIT, and the University of Michigan.

"If students don't know what EE is about, they won't be as likely to pick it as a field of study. Educators need to make it clear to students what electrical engineering really entails, because it's a lot more than just building and connecting wires, powering society," Liu said. "It's just a matter or students realizing/seeing jobs grow in that area."

In Berkeley's EECS department, classes that bridge to computer science (such as networking and communications) have the highest enrollments. Horowitz said Stanford's machine learning course and other "optimization type classes" are popular.

Intersil said: "At the top schools this [innovation] evolution is well underway, with students exposed to the latest tools, methods and models to prepare them for the workforce. What they need most, however, is practical experience that can really only be gained by working with a strong mentor on real-world projects."

Jeff Will, chairman and associate professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Valparaiso University in Indiana, said jobs are constantly being created as new technologies emerge and old ones continue to be used. Students will need to know basics but also be on the cutting edge.

"Job titles stay the same, but what you're expected to know to fill that role is changing,” Will said. "Keeping up isn't easy. What we keep instilling in our graduates is the idea of lifelong learning. It's no longer the case that you take what you learned in four years and apply it for the rest of your life."

EE Times polled educators on the top EE titles and careers of the future. Click through to learn where the industry is headed.


Embedded systems engineer
Embedded systems development ranges from things like microprocessor-based control systems to SoC design and device software development for consumer electronics, medical, and military applications. These engineers may focus on designing software components and physical dynamics of a system with real-time and concurrent behaviors. Engineers and industry love to argue what an embedded system is, but the general definition of an embedded system is any system with an integrated circuit that is not a general-purpose computer.

"Embedded systems is growing. It's big. That's kind of the Internet of Things," Liu said. "That requires software as well as hardware confidence."

A modem with embedded systems.(Source: Wikipedia Commons)



Within this field, engineers may use data science to make sense of information gathered by the embedded systems. Think sensors integrated into SoCs, tuning systems for strings on a guitar, or fielding information from a car's embedded subsystem.

The prevalence of smaller, lower-power, and lower-cost embedded systems will allow for more microprocessors to exist within one device. Will said these embedded systems will have to communicate with one another, and embedded systems engineers will have to know about embedded networks.

"The chips themselves are becoming more powerful. Embedded systems are actually going to have an operating system. With a higher and higher level of abstraction in microprocessors, you're writing multithreaded applications," he said. "Engineers will need to know a number of different software tools, embedded C, and languages -- also a fundamental understanding of networks and inter-device communication."

Ganssle wrote in an email: "I think that as engineers are being hired to use software to replace hardware, but the opposite is also happening." Field-programmable gate arrays "are an example where the hardware is so much faster than software can be. Of course, it's muddled as that kind of hardware design is very much like software, since the engineers are using Verilog, VHDL, etc."
Information systems engineer
"Some of most vibrant areas of electrical engineering are things having to do with the more mathematical side, often called information systems, that has to do with coding, compression, error correction," Horowitz said. "This is also related to machine learning."

Systems and applications, particularly within the growing IoT, have large lines of code that need to be automated, synthesized, and verified. Automating this process requires advancements in hardware, software, and methodology.

"With so much information, it won't be useful unless people have a way to analyze it," Liu said. "Students are certainly seeing that there are jobs if they learn math and can apply that for data analytics." Information systems can enable arts, humanities, and social sciences to make discoveries or archive their work.

Information systems engineers are increasingly needed to develop systems to make sense of collected information in complex and ubiquitous applications. The field uses many complimentary methodologies for EE and computer science to process data -- an emerging area Liu said is very popular among her students. Horowitz said he has seen growing interest in creating information systems for applications and sensors -- further showing information systems' ability to integrate with other areas such as embedded systems.

"There are a lot of aspects of information systems. Some parts of it are in more traditional signal processing. Others are in probabilistic systems, and some of those results are being applied to biology," Horowitz said. "There's a lot of interest in those areas tied into extracting information from large amounts of data."

Biomedical engineer
This career has been around for a while, but the field is growing. Biomedical engineering seeks to close the gap between engineering and medicine to advance healthcare treatment, diagnosis, and monitoring. Biomedical engineers can develop functions and applications for wearable health trackers and implanted medical systems.

Horowitz said there is "interesting work going on with the interconnection with biology, such as creating new ways of interacting with the world around using ultrasonics and acoustic waves."

Liu said these engineers might focus on "instrumenting the brain," where very low-power devices could communicate wirelessly with sensors implanted in the brain to monitor activity. Such a system would require knowledge of communicative devices, as well as simple circuit design.

The creation of flexible medical devices presents another opportunity for biomed engineers. EE professors have begun to teach microfabrication technology for the development of electronic skin, Liu said. These courses cover, not only conventional IC fabrication on chips for computers, but also flexible large areas for a wider variety of medical applications.

Security engineer
This title covers many possible jobs with (according to this list) some of the highest salaries in the business. Security engineers may be tasked with managing the integrity of a company or application infrastructure. This requires knowledge of operating systems and communications, as well as data analytics.

Within this realm, there is a need for ethical hackers (also known as white hat or computer security experts) who specialize in testing methodologies to ensure the security of information systems. Hacking (or making) hardware has seen a resurgence in recent years.

In an interview with EE Times at CDNLive, Chris Rowen, Tensilica founder and Cadence Fellow, called "anything involving the cloud and security" important subareas for engineers to consider. "Finding the security loop holes in any system will be important, including the human loopholes." Securing and controlling the human component in a data system is just as important to the security of the data.

Liu said that, in previous years, "people found hacking software more fun or easier because it didn't take much time for them to innovate and improve software design. For hardware, if you want to build a system it takes a lot longer. Raspberry Pi, Arduino -- these little systems are affordable and because of that, it seems like there’s a resurgence of interest in hardware."

Companies want to hire people with experience in design and system function, Liu said. Those with experience with successful designs will also know how and why designs don't work. As a result, hacking and making will be more valuable to companies making cheap devices or systems for the mass market.

Power management, power engineer
Officials from Intersil, which recently "realigned" its focus toward power management, said power engineers will be very valuable in the future.

(Source: Mingblebox.com)
(Source: Mingblebox.com)

"We certainly see a limited pool of power experts designing power sub systems for next generation equipment," the officials wrote, citing high powered datacenters and servers among the systems that need increased power efficiency. The company also said it sees a need for bright, young engineers. "We are an aging industry and we need more students to study engineering at the university level to keep the influx of new talent."

Intersil is far from the only company realigning itself to focus on power; Fairchild Semiconductor recently announced power plans of its own.


Traditional titles
Systems, network, and mobile engineers will remain in demand in the coming years. Those in the networking and telecommunications fields also made the top-earning title list, earning between $82,000 and $156,000 a year. Systems engineers will also find work in extracting information from data and working with information systems.

"There are more software and firmware engineering jobs to support increased system complexity," the Intersil officials wrote. "There is more specialization by application, with more application knowledge required. In general, engineers have to have a larger view of the full system than in the past."

Analog designers, for example, are learning more about coding. Digital designers are becoming more aware of how to capture and compute analog data in a way that provides accessible telemetry for smart applications.

Imagination president Krishna Yarlagadda told us at CNDLive that analog, wireless, and RF engineering are important because of the push to get everything in the cloud. Cadence's Rowen said: "It's only a matter of when, not if, all our appliances and devices in our homes become connected and start talking to each other."

Liu said: "Opportunities are still plentiful for design engineers, hardware engineers, product engineers. It does seem to be a trend that, in order to get an interesting job, you need to have a master's degree for the hardware side; not the case for software. This was not typical 10 years ago, mainly because there is so much more to learn nowadays."

Systems or hardware engineers may be employable at companies with large datacenters such as Google, which designs its own chips. Those engineers could design computer chips and datacenters to be more energy efficient.

"Make sure you get a design job," Ganssle suggested to engineering students. "A lot of engineers are sidelined into support arenas, and few of us really like that. Find a team that is excited about their work. Avoid big companies where engineers are just cogs in the system. Find a group where you can make a significant impact on the project; a lot of systems are so big today that no one really knows what is going on."

Trending down
"There are lots of areas that I personally think are going to not change as much as they did before… the whole integrated circuit technology growth area is starting to mature," Horowitz said. "So the people I know who are designing computers and chips are now using those same skills and applying them to different kinds of applications."

Additionally, Liu said there isn't much growth in silicon and IC manufacturing within the United States. There are manufacturing jobs overseas, but they aren't financially attractive. "At this point, we don't have as many fabs as in China, Taiwan. As manufacturing becomes pretty much all automated, maybe that will swing back to the US." The number of students taking classes in semiconductor manufacturing is going down.

Likewise, fields like information theory have traditionally had fewer jobs available. Those jobs typically go to PhD-level graduates, whose numbers are slumping.