Whether you are a freshly minted graduate or a seasoned engineer with a career at full throttle, knowing the hot areas in technology and engineering is vital. Beyond just helping you sort out jobs in the classifieds, this knowledge will guide you in choosing the continuing education courses to take and the journals to read. It may even help you decide if it's time for a major career change.

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Fortunately, after some tough years, things are looking up economically. Globally, the latest report from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development notes that economic momentum is "already strong in North America and most of Asia" and is now "well established in Japan," with Europe "progressively recovering." This improvement translates into jobs. In the United States, for example, despite concerns about outsourcing, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports: "Opportunity is expected to be good for most engineering occupations over the next 10 years because the number of engineering degrees awarded is not expected to grow while the number of people retiring is expected to be quite high."

For computer science in particular, the need for workers will far outstrip the available talent. The bureau notes that most of the demand for technology professionals will spring from communications, consumer, and defense-related products as business and other organizations seek new technologies to increase efficiency and productivity.

The IEEE has also identified several emerging technologies that promise growth: digital rights management, display technologies, fingerprinting, organic electronics, alternative fuels and the hydrogen economy, and Wi-Fi. To learn more about these areas, the IEEE maintains a portal that briefly describes each technology and what the future might hold for it at http://www.ieee.org/portal/site/emergingtech/index.jsp?pageID=emerging_home.

Now that you know the hot areas, wouldn't it be nice if all you had to do was to pick one, get a great job, and work happily ever after in your career? Yes, it would be nice, but the real world is not a fairy tale.

For starters, what if I had written this article 10 years ago, and you had taken the advice to get a job in the then-exploding dot-com or telecommunications industry? Perhaps some of you did. I visited Lucent Technologies Inc.'s Murray Hill, N.J., headquarters a few years ago and saw the expanse of empty cubicles clogging the building's magnificent atrium, the workspaces of engineers who were let go only months after the frantic hiring that ended so suddenly. There are no "sure things."

So as well as giving you a fish for today—that list of hot areas—I'd like to teach you how to fish—that is, show you ways to stay on top of your industry so that you'll always have an idea of what's hot and what's not and you'll learn how to make decisions even when the future is cloudy.

One way to stay on top of things is to subscribe to publications that regularly have technology reviews. These are often easily available on the Internet and, don't forget, in libraries. Apart from—of course!—IEEE Spectrum, these include industry and trade publications, newsweekly magazines like The Economist, and weekly newspaper sections like Circuits and Science Times in The New York Times. I try to read the tables of contents in publications to flag items of interest and page through the publication before filing or discarding it—apart from the articles, useful information can even be found in, yes, the advertisements!

Professional societies are another fertile source. Check out their publications, committee reports, journals, and other messages. Think of conference programs as windows on movements in the field and note the topics being presented. If you can't go to a conference, contact the speakers of interest and request a copy of their papers or presentations; this may also lead to someone you can network with for future career opportunities.