Companies from Google to Comcast, AT&T and Verizon are looking for qualified candidates to fill content delivery jobs, ranging from sales to network, software and information technology positions.
RCR explored this ecosystem of content delivery in a recent special report, and surveyed open positions across the major players in the industry to compile this list of the types of skills that are most frequently sought by employers in the content delivery space.
The top 5 skills in demand for content delivery jobs include:
1. Programming skills. Specific requirements often include Java, C, C++, and HTML expertise, and preferences for workers who are comfortable in a Linux/Unix environment.
Software and programming expertise is expected to become even critical so as the telecom industry figures out how to best leverage software-defined networking.
“I think you’re going to need people that understand how to deliver content effectively and efficiently from an SDN perspective,” said Matt Goldberg, senior director of service provider solutions for SevOne. “Technology is evolving very quickly. From a worker’s perspective, you’re going to need a very strong understanding of how IP works, and how video works, and see if, with a lot of smart people in a room, you can come up with ways to tune different parameters so that the end customer is getting the best experience.”
2. Familiarity with streaming technologies such as HTTP streaming, specifically solutions including Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Real-Time Media Protocol (RTMP), MPEG-DASH or Microsoft Smooth Streaming. This may seem self-evident for content delivery-related positions, but is increasingly important as video consumption in particular moves from linear content to on-demand viewing by consumers, both on televisions and on mobile devices.
To get a sense of the breadth of user devices that content delivery systems must account for, one need only look at Adobe’s latest Video Benchmarking Report for online video/TV Everywhere. Adobe found an increasingly fragmented viewing ecosystem: Android apps grew to 20% of the online TV watching market, browsers shrank to 19% market share, and iOS continued to lead in market share with 51%. Gaming consoles and OTT devices had the largest growth in market share, up to 10%. Adobe also found that smartphone viewing of online videos surpassed tablet viewing for the first time, climbing to 14% via smartphone compared to 13% on tablets.
3. Wireless networking skills, including familiarity with multimedia presentation over 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi. With the push for TV Everywhere — which is expected to be showcased by Comcast at this year’s Super Bowl, for instance — a high-quality mobile experience and access to content on-the-go is increasingly important not only to wireless operators, but to content providers and to cable companies, who are building out large Wi-Fi networks. While cellular data use is growing faster than Wi-Fi, it only accounted for about 3% of IP traffic in 2013, according to Cisco – while Wi-Fi accounted for 41%.
4. Excellent communication skills. The ability to clearly communicate is particularly in demand in CDN companies such as Akamai and Limelight, which deliver content for third parties (off-net, as opposed to “on-net” CDN companies such as Google and Netflix, which do not sell their CDN services but use them to deliver their own content). Off-net CDN engineers often must work with external clients and are expected to be able to present technical information in an understandable way.
5. Experience with big data systems. Increasingly, familiarity with in-memory database systems such as Hadoop are being asked of software engineers and quality assurance engineers in the content delivery and networking arena, as well as those with explicit big data titles. Experience with Structured Query Language (SQL) for relational database management systems (RDBMS), as well as NoSQL systems is often requested or required for positions related to content delivery.
Although the above skills are currently in demand for content delivery jobs, in a fast-evolving industry, the particulars are sure to change — so flexibility and eagerness to learn new skills are key.
“IP will be the foundation,” Goldberg said, but added that people interested in the evolving content delivery ecosystem “will need someone who can run at a million miles per hour, and is very eager to learn new technologies as they evolve. We see this with the carriers we work with even today.”
Goldberg added that the ability to absorb and apply knowledge across different technology domains will be particularly prized.
“We can’t find enough skilled people,” Goldberg said. “The ones that we can, very often are focused on particular domains – which is fantastic, but they’re going to need more of that.”
