Bangalore:  You as a programmer, do you live under constant fear of your job being outsourced, or shipped overseas or you being ousted by another smart coder? If the answer to even one these questions is a yes, then this is a wakeup call for you to specialize.

“There is demand, but no supply of good programmers” complain the tech giants. So how does a developer live up to the industry standards where rote coding and code maintenance are easily classified as nothing more than low-value functions and ones that are easily outsourced.

There is no denying that coding is still a lucrative job. But with most of the code available as library functions and thousands of public code repositories, even cream of the crop in industry do not fall back on copy-pasting the code from the readily available sources or easily outsourcing it to third party companies. So developers who want to maintain an advantage, and prove to be the best of the lot, in today's job market need to specialize.

With IT sector growing at a faster pace than expected, it throws open new genres in technology to explore each day, new possibilities to live up to and challenges to confront. So according to Neil McAllister from Developers World, given below are the five specialized skill areas that are sure to experience rapid growth in the coming years.

1) Cross-Platform Mobile Developers

Tech savvy or not, customers buy their phones based on features, applications, budget and the Smart Phone stands a winner for its convenience and novelty. The Smartphone model chosen by a user actually determines the OS preferred, and with so many players emerging in the market every day, the only trick developers’ need to know is how to access APIs that enable their various features, regardless of platform. This is not possible and easy, because each platform demands a different set of programming, which means a specialized programming language for every app, for every platform, using different set of tools.

Mobile tool makers and vendors can be of great help for cross-platform mobile app development if they build their tools to be compatible on multiple platforms. And developers who are well versed in two or more mobile ecosystems will find themselves in highest demand.