Hi everybody,
I can tell you about my experiences regarding two of those industries, since I work in them: industrial design and to some lesser extend automotive design.
While those fields “traditionally” DO employ specialists for rendering the trend is rapidly moving away from that. Very few industrial design houses still employ a specific “render and CG guy”. Nowadays rendering is a skill that the designers just do themselves (just like CAD-modelling, something that was exclusively done by specialists just 15 years ago, nowadays designers just do it themselves. Only areas where really really high quality class A modelling is required they still employ surface specialists, like for example for car exteriors).
At this point it is simply expected of every designer to render their own work and therefore a supplementary skill. This is mostly fueled by software like Keyshot that focuses on usability and a dead simple user interface. And it works. Everybody who isn’t an idiot can learn to render decently in Keyshot within a week or so. Keyshot will do most of the heavy lifting and takes you 90% where you need to go. In most cases that is already more than good enough. Also look at Vray and their latest Rhino-release and how they streamlined the process of rendering. The reason is simple: in industrial and automotive design Keyshot is eating every bodies lunch right now - usability trumps features.
A developement that won’t stop there but will seep into other industries as well. So to everybody who is looking to work in any sort of pure CG-job should ask him or herself the question: What else apart from pure software mastery do I have to offer? Being good at plugging a lot of complicated node setups into each other is a skillset that is going away, if a designer or engineer can do most of your job himself by simply offering him an easy enough to use software you are in a bad spot.
So what can you REALLY do with your software that can’t be automated by a better user interface or a clever preset? The only way to survive with CG in the future will be either to specialize (and I mean REALLY specialize) or to choose a career as someone who does rendering as a supplementary thing on the side like industrial design or design engineering.