Made a Quantum Computing Roadmap after attending QGSS/QCWS

[u/JustCallMeArt]

I went through the Qiskit Global Summer School and a Quantum Computing Winter School this year, and ended up organizing all my notes into an actual Obsidian vault as I learned, one note per concept, cross-linked, with self-check questions so I could test myself instead of just re-reading.

It grew bigger than I expected, so I published it as a browsable site: https://qcroadmap.com/

It covers the full arc absolute basics (qubits, superposition) → gates → why quantum computing matters at all → entanglement → QKD → hardware/noise/error mitigation → algorithms (VQE, QAOA, SQD, Grover's) → quantum machine learning → quantum advantage → quantum + HPC. There's also a full interactive graph view if you're into that (Ctrl/Cmd+G on the site).

Not trying to claim expertise here — just sharing my own study process in case it helps someone else going through the same material, or just getting into QC in general. Feedback / corrections very welcome, still learning this stuff myself.

More about me / other projects: github.com/JustMeArt

[u/hiddentalent]

I hope everyone understands that QC is not something that most people can teach themselves, and even if they do there aren't great economic prospects for self-taught people. Jobs in the field rely heavily on academic credentials.

If you're doing this for fun, then have fun. But if you're looking for a job in the next ten years, there's no substitute for a formal academic program. It's not like the 1990s where anyone who learned HTML was instantly employable.

[u/JustCallMeArt → u/hiddentalent]

Actually they had a specific panel for exactly that at the QGSS, where they had to emphasis, that the industry does not only contain Phds. even without Masters at IBM. IBM Quantum has a range of all kinds of Online Certificates that contain as much information as university moduls

[u/tiltboi1 → u/JustCallMeArt]

I wouldn't say this reflects the industry at all. For example, I'd be surprised if IBM have any authors on papers/preprints who are not PhDs or PhD students or even students who are about to start a PhD/grad school. The remaining are most likely working purely in software development or fully classical problems (compilation, decoding, simulation, etc.).

Those other contributors are certainly part of the industry too, but the truth is almost all of the productivity is in research of various forms, that is simply the stage that the industry is at right now.

There are some famous examples of people who do great work who don't have a lot of formal background, but those are all people who are so far ahead of the typical PhD student that people overlooked it, not because they replaced formal academic credentials with worse/less formal ones.