Fascinated by the world of artificial intelligence but confused how to start a career in this field? This is probably the reason behind why the question mentioned in the title of this article came to your mind. Here, we will give you a clear guide that will answer all your doubts related to starting a career as an engineer in the field of artificial intelligence.
First Step: Start With Right Stream
The initial step you take matters. This step is not mandatory, but it just eases out the journey ahead.
- Choose the correct stream while making the choice for subjects after your matriculation.
- Going with Mathematics, along with Physics and Computer Science will help you in future if you are planning to become an AI engineer.
- Some mathematical topics such as linear algebra, calculus, and statistics are utilized in developing many AI algorithms.
- Also, these subjects will make your basics strong at a very early stage. So, they will act like a launchpad in your career path.
Second Step: Choosing The Right Undergraduate Course
This step is crucial as the degree you pursue in your undergrad years will have a major role to play in your career. Here are some of the options you can go with while selecting the degree course for a career in artificial intelligence:
- A 4 year B.Tech in Computer Science with AI & ML. Many institutions in India are currently offering this course and you can gather more details about them through the internet.
- A 3 year B.Sc course in Artificial Intelligence or Computer Science.
- You can also go with a 3 year BCA course with a specialization in AI.
As artificial intelligence is an evolving field, the job market is not very stable for this yet. Thus, organizations usually prefer people with higher skills and experience.
As a fresher, one thing you can do to drastically increase your chances of getting shortlisted is to do your undergraduate degree from a reputed college in India such as IITs, NITs, or BITS.
Third Step: Your Skills Matter The Most
This is something you cannot skip or sideline. Skill building is essential for landing a job in the field of AI. If you don’t have skills, no organization or startup will be interested in you, no matter what stream you took after 10th or what college you went to for a degree.
Here are few things that you can work on to build your skillset for a career in artificial intelligence:
- Learn programming languages. Python is mostly helpful in AI but you can also learn other languages such as C++, Java, or R depending upon your area of interest.
- Fundamentals of coding, algorithms, and data structures. These are some things using which complex machine programs are written.
- Understand topics of mathematics that are utilized in the algorithms of AI such as probability, linear algebra, statistics, and calculus.
- Learn about neural networks and other important frameworks.
Fourth Step: Build Projects And A Portfolio
Building a project solidifies your learnings and also shows the recruiter that you’ve implemented what you’ve learnt.
- Start building small projects and publish them on Github.
- Contribute to open source repositories. This will help you immensely in connecting with like-minded people.
- Create your linkedin profile and start building connections.
- Build your resume that showcases the skills you’ve acquired along with the projects that you built.
- You can also acquire industry relevant certifications and mention them in your resume.
What’s Next?
The four steps that we have mentioned cover almost all the basic points that can help you in starting a career in artificial intelligence after 12th. We have tried to keep them all-inclusive so that students from every domain can extract benefits from it.
But, what after this?
Here comes the part where you actually start making money in this career path. Start applying in big companies and startups that have openings for AI engineer roles.
Most of the time companies don’t directly list the opening as an AI engineer role, rather give it some other term. See the skillset required in that particular opening in such cases.