BANGALORE, INDIA: Infrastructure, Manufacturing, Telecom or Pharma--speak of any industry and you'll get to hear of their stupendous growth. IT is the backbone behind all sectors and plays a pivotal role in the growth of the business. All these sectors require the services of skilled IT people. Starting this month, we'll feature a regular story on hot career opportunities in IT.

Today, there's a growing requirement for IT professionals in areas such as programming, engineering, database, information warehousing, Internet and E-Commerce, enterprise application deployment and management, SOA, and networking. Each area requires professionals at all levels right from the architects who'll define these solutions to managers who will implement and manage them.

We'll start off with the developer segment, because that's one segment which spans all others. For instance, although you need professionals with business and implementation knowledge for deploying enterprise applications like ERP and CRM, you'll still need somebody who can customize the code of these applications. The same thing holds true for other areas as well, such as SOA, Internet and e-Commerce, etc. Let's start with a broad overview of the career opportunities in these areas.

Basically, there are two main platforms that most developer population works upon, Java and .NET. SOA is another buzzword-virtually every enterprise is trying to get on this bandwagon, and hence this field also has a high potential for IT professionals. Similarly, another area where a lot of activity is happening is embedded technologies and mobility and yes, not to forget the ERP domain which have had always been a top priority for any enterprise. It is not just IT companies, there are a plethora of new ways coming up for the IT professionals to build their career in.

One way is to gain expertise in one specific domain such as SOA and ERP and then climb the career ladder. And the interesting thing is that these domains are not restricted for hard core IT guys even non-IT knowledge holders can enter this arena. In this article, we'll not only discuss all the hidden opportunities that are there for IT as well as non IT professionals, but we'll also guide them about how they can choose their perfect career path.