IoT education multifaceted, but must be role-specific

Hands-on IoT education programs are often run in affiliation with companies that supply the IoT market. For example, infrastructure-oriented Cisco offers IoT training through the Cisco Learning Network. IoT platform company Particle Industries Inc. partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to support its IoT educational program, working directly with CMU’s Integrated Innovation Institute. Particle has also partnered with MIT’s IoT Bootcamp.

According to Josh Siegel, lead instructor of the MIT IoT Bootcamp, program offerings have attracted hundreds of well-qualified applicants, “including high school students, college and graduate students, entrepreneurs, newly hired employees and executives from across industries.” Because IoT impacts so many disparate fields, there’s no one typical profile, he said.

“We see people applying to the program to get a leg up at getting into higher education programs, to learn to teach, to help raise funding for their own company, to secure a promotion or to facilitate a transfer to a new department, organization or industry,” Siegel said.

The program focuses on “sensing, connectivity, inference and action” — and sometimes includes short lectures on machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and virtual and augmented reality, Siegel added.

Meanwhile, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, George Westerman, a principal research scientist with the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, agreed there is a huge need for IoT education, both to understand the general direction of the technology as well as the specifics. The courses offered at Sloan appeal to a wide audience, but especially management.

While many IoT concepts are similar to the transformative ideas of previous technology waves, Westerman said, the challenge with IoT is “how to make a clean architecture and change the business, rather than simply implementing a new technology.” Thus, he said, managers don’t need to know how it works, but they need to grasp the possibilities.

Sloan offers courses that can serve both management and technical audiences. Those attending range from entry-level professionals to seasoned executives, and include those with both highly technical and purely business skills.

At CMU, focusing more on the technology side, Jelena Kovačević, head of electrical and computer engineering and professor of biomedical engineering, said she finds companies asking for specific cyber-physical systems or IoT education. In general, she said, “they are looking for people who have broad engineering skills and who can tackle complex real-world problems from hardware to software.” According to Kovačević, CMU has a new master’s program with a concentration in cyber-physical systems starting next fall and is working to offer a parallel program at the undergraduate level. “Our undergraduate class is about 180 students per year, and a large percentage is interested in such topics,” she said.

The push for more IoT education and certifications in colleges is often a matter of companies having needs that are not being met “There are still several unresolved issues of IoT that most training ignores,” Samuelsson said. Those issues include the lack of standards, the functions and implementation of IoT servers, and the high knowledge and organizational entry barriers. “The fundamentals of IoT business training are as simple as web and internet business training — the challenge is to create an IoT business, which is 10 times as difficult as creating a simple web business,” Samuelsson said, adding, “The web solved these challenges after five or 10 years, but IoT is just beginning the process.”