What is the Drone Job Market and Where is it Going?

 

With the industry maturing, the drone job market within it is becoming increasingly complex and more difficult to navigate.
drone companies need best engineers to develop the latest UAV technology, supply more automated and integrated solutions for clients.

To help companies navigate the challenges of recruitment, here are some research to show you what the drone job market looks like.

 

U.S. Companies are Top Recruiters, While Israel is Home to Rising Stars

Our team looked at over 400 companies in the hardware, software and services sectors of the drone industry in 2018, a ¼ of which had job openings at the time of research.

Of course, it was impossible to present true market shares in this instance, many companies hiring not via head-hunters.

Wanted: Software Engineers

We looked at 903 job advertisements listed by 102 different companies – 622 were hardware manufacturers, 150 software.

Despite most job advertisements coming from platform manufacturers, the most sought-after position was in fact that of a software engineer.

  1. Software engineersare the most sought after in the drone industry both by platform manufacturers and by software companies

    Most of companies hiring software engineers for their R&D divisions firstly, in order to continue increase the level of automation within their products

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  2. Hardware engineers
    Drone manufacture need Professional skills in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering,so Hardware engineers are exclusively sought after by hardware manufacturers
  3. Sales roles are the portion of drone jobs which are customer oriented
  4. Operations job offerings represent the bulk of manual jobs including work of technicians, inspectors, and warehouse staff.
  5. Management jobs include a wide selection of roles which exist to make the workflow in the company smoother. such as project managers ,business intelligence analysts etc.

What’s new?

The following is a comparison of the demand for UAV jobs in 2017-2018.

This data reflects the significant increase in the demand for software engineers, not matched by other roles in drone companies.

In addition to racing to develop the latest UAV technology, drone company also need to finding the right hardware engineers, software experts, sales people and marketing specialists.

What’s Next?

The global skill shortage will soon strongly influence company strategies.

Stronger emphasis on E2E solutions will create more interdisciplinary teams, mixtures of hardware and software engineers, to create and sell the most competitive products.

Emerging markets like India, Tanzania, Brazil and many more will require well-trained staff to scale production and operation meaning that this year will feature a tremendous increase in drone job offerings in emerging markets.
With the new EU regulations nearing completion EU countries will also pick up speed in scaling their businesses, hiring new staff for large-scale manufacturing, sales and customer services.

In short, 2019 will be the year of scaling as firms race to find needles in haystacks in the form of the most competent and specifically qualified employees.

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