One thing all of those companies seem to have in common, says John M. Dolan, principal systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and a self-driving vehicle researcher in the school’s Robotics Institute, is the value they place on employees with that broad skill set.

“Generally speaking, it’s not enough to be just a programmer or an engineer,” Dolan says. “You might be hired to write the code or design the hardware, but they expect you to be able to understand the big picture.”

All three experts interviewed for this story emphasized that the self-driving car/autonomous vehicle industry is still in its infancy, and that it is evolving quickly and often in unpredictable ways. With that caveat in place, they offered the following advice for students and educators:
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