Career decision making is getting more complex by the day, and it is impossible to manually keep track of emerging trends. Just like a business, professions too go through a cycle of acceleration and depression for, with time there is need for better. There are over 1,000+ career options that one can pursue in this country, but it’s critical to be up-to-date. There are some broad trends that you must look at, to understand the ever-changing dynamics in the world of careers, and make an informed choice for yourself.

From the easiest of tasks, to the most difficult ones, technology and engineering provide quick and effective solutions. Who would have imagined10-years-ago that we’d be able to save data in clouds, or leverage technology to go shopping, wait-free and cashless. With the pace at which technology is growing exponentially by each passing day, it would possible eliminate a need of human intervention in some careers. Career progressions that do not keep up with the pace, at which the world is progressing, will be rendered redundant. So many careers, like those in info-tech, tourism, banking that were sought after decade ago are seeing radical changes.

you notice carefully, the most sought after jobs today, like those in app development, digital marketing, social media strategy, culinary arts, product management etc, which are all the rage now, were unheard of a decade ago. Today careers change, transform and evolve at breakneck speeds, and thus, it is imperative that one must take into account the core skills that the present and future jobs would require. This is especially critical, seeing that today’s students will spend over 70 per cent of their adult life at their workplace. Thus it is all the more crucial that one make an informed decision, rather than relying on pure hearsay.

This is exactly where, Mindler comes in. This platform drives career awareness and scientific decision making through one of the most advanced career assessment platforms which is coupled with technology led career activities and strategic human interventions through career domain experts. We believe that only high-performance and academic-brilliance isn’t enough today. There needs to be a synergy between one’s innate characteristics and skills, and the careers they go into.

New-age careers demand much more to cut it. Some of the key skills that careers in the coming years will require are emotional and social intelligence, cross-cultural competency, design thinking, ability to live in the virtual world and collaborate effectively, creative problem solving, and adaptation and high learnability. An interesting thing you find with new-age careers is that they require a beautiful mix of expertise, and generalisations. Given the specialised nature of work, one must have the expertise to deliver high-value solutions, but also the ability and flexibility of implementing the same across industries, and services. In sync, with the thought, here are the top five careers, students should watch out for in 2017:

n Product management: This sits at the intersection of the business goals, consumer needs and technology. They are responsible for strategy, roadmap and feature definition to build something that is valuable, usable and feasible for both the consumer and the company. A good product manager has to be passionate about the user experience, optimising business targets and involved in the tech stack. They play a key role in defining the vision and designing the solution. Sure it’s tough to dabble across functions but it’s also the most fun you can have while curating your company’s success.

Content design: In today’s digital age, content is the king. Content designers design, and create specific content pieces such as blogs, texts, creatives, engagement posts, campaigns, videos, video blogs, etc, basis which the digital marketing activities can be carried out. Content designers may either be platform agnostic, and design content for all social media platforms, or they could specialize in generating content for one type of platform only. For them, it is literally – keep calm, be creative and create content.Opportunities exist to work in organisations or make an amazing career by freelancing as well.

Ethical hacking: Ethical hackers are computer and networking experts who systematically, legitimately and with company’s permission, attempts to penetrate a computer system or network to find security vulnerabilities that a malicious hacker could potentially exploit.The companies and organisations save all their private and confidential information, in form of electronic data. This, more often than not, is prone to cyber-crime, and hence, the demand for white-hat hackers, or ethical hackers is on the rise. They also find their skills being used to fight of cyber-crime, and in finance and banking sector.

UI/UX design: “The world is in your hand” is the motto app developers lead their lives by. A few years-ago they would have been in the top career list, but now its migrating to UI/UX design instead.While app developers would automate every day-to-day task, and put it on your phone, UI/UX design experts optimise the overall user experience. The customer experience is what differentiates one app from the other in today’s day and age. From looking at restaurants, to ordering from some, from booking cabs within minutes, to translating any foreign language instantaneously, and so on – everything is just a few taps away in apps and UI/UX designers are at the helm of this!

Psychology: This as a discipline has been underestimated in India, for quite some time now. Keeping up with the pace of the world has its own set of pressures. Psychologists help us keep our mental and emotional well-being in check. From life coaches to organisation behaviour to career or organisational coaches to sports psychologists, they are useful in every sphere today. The demand for professionals in this domain is on an exponential rise over the last few years and we believe it’s one of the careers to watch out for.

In the competitive industry, there are only two elements that will give you that added edge working on profiles that capitalise your strengths, and continuously building your skill set.

The writer is founder and chief executive officer, Mindler.