You don't have to major in computer science or electrical engineering to work at Microsoft. In fact, there are a number of nontraditional areas within tech that Microsoft's recruiters are scoping out right now. In a blog post Monday, Microsoft's Eugenia Sawa outlined the top three "hottest academic areas for a future career in tech." "It is worth thinking beyond a traditional Computer Science degree or even an Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) program," Sawa said. "Microsoft is hiring people with unique backgrounds, some that are new with the inception of the Cloud, web services and the amazing scale at which the industry is operating." The three academic areas are: Data mining/machine learning/AI/natural language processing Business intelligence/competitive intelligence Web analytics, A/B testing and statistical analysis It's all about the cloud and Web services, it seems. Microsoft finally figured that out, declaring this past spring that it's "all in" for cloud computing.
"All of these fields help us sift through and organize huge amounts of information or data," Sawa wrote. "When you apply your knowledge in these areas to a challenging problem in the online space, you know that you are working at a scale that is just immense."
"The ability to see trends, make sense of data to a business audience and help to understand your customers requires a special person," she wrote. "Someone with a mix of engineering, BI/CI experience and a business mindset can take this field to the next level. "
"Retailers, web services, and advertisers will need people in these fields as they try to get the most for their advertising money," Sawa said. "As we continue to see the dollar amounts spent for online advertising worldwide, these fields will be hot and we will see online advertising change over time as a result of these positions."
Top 3 'hottest' college majors for working at Microsoft