Internet of Things: Is there a skill shortage?

Who would not want their mundane daily life tasks like switching off the lights, turning up the thermostat temperatures or having their favourite meal cooked for dinner after a tiring day’s work? As lucrative as it sounds, these jobs can be easily handled by IoT devices and electronic hardware manufacturers like Siemens, Bosch, Intel, Qualcomm, Beagelcore are investing enormous capital value in finding the right talents for their IoT development projects. On the other hand, somewhere upwards of 25 million global jobs are supposed to attributed solely to IoT in the future. Currently, many industry giants follow a “hire and train” model for meeting their IoT development needs. Owing to an everchanging knowledge base around these areas, developers frequently changing companies and a high training time, not only does production time shoots up, sometimes it takes months or even years to start working on actually building the software.

However, where are the IoT specialists? Don’t they have a solution to this problem? The picture above displays the search data for 2 common developer positions as compared to an IoT developer. Without a doubt, IoT developer is fairly “unknown” relative to its other IT developer counterparts. When each day the traffic of IoT devices are staggering and a $19 trillion market share by IoT devices only in the US, how are companies upgrading themselves to the rising needs?

Imagine you own a coffee company delivering tons of coffee per day to their delivery stations distributed throughout the world. Sorting out these huge amounts of coffee into packets, based on their end delivery location and getting them loaded for shipment is a huge manual effort on part of the company. This can be easily replaced by a geo-tagged barcode scanner, an address-liable printer and a smart arm to offload them into the final delivery vehicle. All you need is a barcode scanner, a printer, a Raspberry Pi, an IoT development team and you are good to reduce your entire production line from 3 hours of manual effort to 30 minutes. Yes!!! — but the IoT developer will come to you with his own set of challenges and that’s what makes it a niche sector to adapt for traditional industries. To start with, a development team faces:

1. Networking technologies such as Ethernet, TCP/IP — When your IoT developers start out on these Industrial IoT projects, configuring and setting up the right protocol between the physical embedded world of sensors, microcontrollers and the Internet is a major design challenge.
2. Connecting to the cloud — To provide these applications with cloud programming tools and abstracting the entire hardware layer into a cloud-native world, hosting the system data on these cloud platforms and building secure gateways to use them is the next bottleneck that arises among outdated development teams.
3. General-Purpose Operating Systems (GPOS) and Real-Time Operating Systems — Hosting several applications on different Operating systems, for example the monitoring and interfacing of front-end applications running on a GPOS like Linux and the embedded hardware compatible applications running on a RTOS, an IoT development team needs to have knowledge about different both complex domains.
4. Add to that sharing the code among developers — All of this and the developer needs to share his code from one system to another, making it an uphill time-consuming task.

At Seashell, we target the skill shortage gap with a different approach. Seashell is a fully hosted plug-and-play SaaS platform for your developers, to connect your IoT device fleet to the cloud seamlessly so that a developer, whether front-end, back-end or specializing in the niche IoT domain does not need to worry about low-level operational challenges involved in application development. The platform takes care of addressing connectivity, security infrastructure and the hardware infrastructure requirements so the developers can start coding right in day one. In other words, considering an average annual salary of 60k EUR and a team of 5 devs, savings can easily grow up to 500k per year!