Guest Post by Katia Moskvitch, MPhil, Founder of Tesseract Quantum and The Quantum Kid podcast
Nine-year-old Kai knows exactly who he wants to be when he grows up: a quantum software developer. He wants to create new algorithms on quantum computers, the emerging technology of tomorrow that tech companies are promising to perfect within this decade. But Kai is an exception. In a world where news about qubits and quantum milestones pops up with ever-growing regularity in traditional media and on social networks, it is worrisome that the majority of the population still doesn’t know what benefits this technology will bring.
Earlier this spring, IBM announced a major 30-billion-dollar investment in quantum over the next five years. The company’s quantum head, Jay Gambetta, boldly promised that we’d have a quantum computer capable of surpassing a traditional, classical, machine at certain tasks – thus venturing into the era of ‘quantum advantage’ – as early as 2029. The other players in the quantum field, big and small, have publicly unveiled similar roadmaps.
But here is the problem. Hardware alone, no matter how great it is, won’t get us any closer to the promised land of wonderfully fast calculations thanks to these new machines mimicking the behaviour of atoms. Yes, the IBM quantum computer may indeed solve a problem or two, or three, or a handful by the early 2030s; or maybe Google will get there first, or IonQ, or Quantinuum, or D-Wave. There is no doubt that they will – the field is full of extremely clever people, with the Australian Gambetta who pretty much built the entire IBM quantum department from the ground up, being one of them. But if we don’t have enough quantum software developers to design the algorithms we so desperately need to solve the world’s pressing challenges – and there are many that could benefit from the ultra-fast quantum computations – we simply won’t get too far.
“It’s great that Kai is already programming in Python,” ETH Zurich quantum information professor Renato Renner tells me, as we are recording our first episode of The Quantum Kid podcast, a new educational initiative I am co-hosting with Kai online. “Investing in quantum companies is still a high risk move – but what would be smart is investing in the education of clever young people, who will be the quantum workforce of the future.”
Renner is spot on. Out of roughly 33 million software developers out there, only a fraction – 0.01 percent – would be able to program a quantum computer today. And it’s not for lack of programming opportunities – one can access some of today’s quantum machines entirely for free over the cloud using one of the quantum SDKs (software development kits) and give it a go. IBM’s Qiskit is one of them, then there is Google’s Cirq, Xanadu’s PennyLane, and a few others.
If they know how to do it, that is.
More and more universities now have bachelor and master’s degrees related to quantum – be it as part of physics, computer science or engineering curricula. But that typically means full-time and on location lessons, with two to four years’ time commitment and often a hefty price tag. Still, for young people the options are there, and they are expanding – so when Kai goes to university, he will have a vast choice of quantum-related degrees to pick from.
But the situation is drastically different for all those developers already in the market. Of course, there are countless books on quantum programming, and many of the same industry players that are building quantum hardware also have extensive and fairly comprehensive educational materials on their websites. IBM has even been doing more than that, with its Qiskit summer schools and hackathons, which it has been organising for years, ever since the release of Qiskit over the cloud in 2019.
But to upskill and become a quantum programmer, one first needs to proactively go on a hardware developer’s website. If you are a working professional, you’d need to do it during your own time or try to convince your employer that quantum is the (pretty imminent) future – and that the entire company should be exploring how to leverage this technology.
Upskilling and reskilling should be expanded to entire IT departments in enterprises across a whole range of industries, where quantum is expected to make an impact – healthcare, manufacturing, automotive, logistics, finance, telecom, advanced materials, even space exploration. In short, nearly every industry, minus perhaps the likes of hotel services, teaching, journalism, or law – but even there, quantum will bring benefits if you use it the right way.
And apart from educational resources on quantum hardware developers’ websites, there are really not many additional comprehensive courses on quantum out there. Even the most thorough internet search won’t reveal a lot of options for graduates and working professionals – there is simply nothing similar to an MBA or one of the 2-, 4-, or 6-month-long courses so often offered by business schools. A few universities offer ‘deep dives’ in quantum for professionals – ETH offers a two-day course, Oxford – a one-day course, and MIT Pro – a four-week course. But just how deeply can you dive into such a complex subject over a day or two, really? A month is slightly better, but still unlikely to make you a quantum expert.
Then there are courses of varying quality and complexity on MOOC platforms like Coursera or EdX, some offered by academia (University of Chicago is one of them) or industry (Google’s Quantum AI has some, as does IBM).
According to the recent Quantum Index Report 2025, by researchers at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, the demand for quantum skills has nearly tripled since 2018. So the awareness is rising, and more and more CEOs and CTOs are becoming ‘quantum-curious.’
It’s time for universities and other educational organisations to wake up and start creating comprehensive online courses and tailored trainings for professionals to catch up with the state of quantum hardware. The technology will be here sooner than we think, and we need to be ready to use it.
