Posted on 01/03/2006 8:53:46 AM PST by SirLinksalot
What Tech Skills Are Hot for 2006?
Developers, security experts and project managers will be in demand
News Analysis by Thomas Hoffman
DECEMBER 27, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Whether you're looking for a job or looking to fill one, expect hiring to heat up this year, driven by small but consistent gains in IT budgets. And if you're a job seeker with the right skills, 2006 could be your big year. Despite the notion that hordes of U.S. IT jobs are being sent offshore, in reality, less than 5% of the 10 million people who make up the U.S. IT job market had been displaced by foreign workers through 2004, says Scot Melland, president and CEO of Dice Inc., a New York-based online jobs service. The numbers of jobs posted on Dice.com from January through September for developers, project managers and help desk technicians rose 40%, 47% and 45%, respectively, compared with the same period in 2004, says Melland.
In fact, an exclusive Computerworld survey revealed that two of the top four skills IT executives will hire for in the coming year are perennially linked with outsourcing, namely, application development (ranked first) and IT help desk skills (ranked fourth). Information security skills ranked second, and project management came in third.
Here's what staffing experts have to say about the demand in these hot skills areas.
1. Desperate For Developers
There's a lot of talk about developer jobs being sent overseas, but "most of the stuff that's going offshore is low-level coding jobs," says Craig Symons, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Over the past year, companies have started working through their backlog of IT projects. As a result, says Symons, demand for developers with .Net and Java skills has increased, as has the need for business analysts and IT relationship managers who work with business managers to understand their divisions' requirements.
Case in point: An employer that was working with Talenthire.com, a job placement service in Atlanta, was recently negotiating salary terms with an entry-level C++ and .Net developer. The technician, who had graduated from college in 2004 and probably started his career making $40,000-plus per year, quickly moved up in salary by about $10,000, says Mike Veronesi, a managing partner at Talenthire.com. After Talenthire.com's customer offered the candidate $60,000, he demanded $62,500. "In this marketplace, those people are just tough to get," says Veronesi.
"Customer requirements [for developers] are getting much more specific," says Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of strategy and marketing at Yoh Services LLC in Philadelphia. "The requirement used to be 'Give me a good CRM developer,' " says Lanzalotto. "Now, the requirement is 'Give me a good CRM developer with specific experience in the pharmaceutical industry.' "
NStar, a Boston-based energy utility, is hunting for developers with the power-industry experience needed to support its supervisory control and data acquisition environment, says Eugene Zimon, senior vice president and CIO at the company.
"I would see the need for application developers as much more specialized in terms of developing integration components, user interfaces and reusable components," says Zimon. "It's application development, but it's much more specialized and targeted to make use of your existing infrastructure."
2. Seeking Security Mavens
There's continued demand for people with information security skills, say Symons and others. And even though long-term demand is expected to remain strong, the growing ranks of people who have obtained IT security certifications has had a short-term dampening effect on compensation.
David Foote, principal and chief research officer at Foote Partners LLC in New Canaan, Conn., says there has been strong demand for people with Cisco security skills as well as those with IT auditing certifications. Still, he says, compensation for security skills has tapered off in recent months as many unemployed and underemployed IT workers have obtained security skills to become more marketable. The resulting increase in security specialists has helped to deflate wages, at least in the short term, says Foote.
Dice's Melland says he's starting to see skills shortages in different geographies, including a need for network security experience and government security clearances.
To meet its own changing business requirements, NStar is adjusting its skill mix of full-time IT workers and contractors through attrition, new hires and retraining, says Zimon. High on its list are security analysts because NStar is in the final throes of a four-year effort to create a team of security and risk management specialists.
3. In Pursuit of Project Managers
As the economy continues to improve, companies are beginning to attack their backlog of projects, which is helping to fuel the demand for project developers. As a result, project managers with specific expertise -- like those who have worked on projects related to Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliance -- are becoming harder to find, says Frank Enfanto, vice president of health care services systems delivery at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts Inc. in Boston.
"There are a lot of security- and compliance-related requirements that are driving a lot of the spending in projects these days," says Enfanto.
Location is another issue. "It's really frustrating trying to find project managers in this geography," says Mark Uihlein, vice president of information systems at Mohegan Sun, a gaming and resort company in Uncasville, Conn. Aside from the casino, Uncasville, which is in the southeastern corner of Connecticut, is rural, says Uihlein, and most employers in the greater Hartford area are in insurance and financial services.
Many big companies are working on multiple projects simultaneously, which is fueling a "critical need" for project managers, says Andy Baker, senior recruiting manager at Allstate Insurance Corp. in Northbrook, Ill. In addition to finding the right people in an ever-tightening labor market, Allstate is also wrestling with determining whether the business units in need of project managers have funds they can set aside for possible relocation costs, he adds.
The consultant knew that "ease of use" sells better than security to a non-techie. Besides, he doesn't hang around to clean up the mess.
I loved it when I was told the most powerful person in the dept needed the ability to shut down her firewall in case she couldn't get to a website.
so do I
We'd all be rich LOL
This is getting a wee bit silly. A perfectly working network is of zero value - its a conduit for software to run. No software - no purpose for the network/storage. Of course if there is no network then there is no vehicle for the software so both sides are needed.
Network engineers are analogous to those the build highways and maintain traffic flow devices and developers are analogous to people that design and build the vehicles that use the roads - saying one is more important than the other is rather silly.
What tech skills are HOT for 2006? People who can count up to twenty withouot taking off their shoes.
Is that like a hanging chad reader?
I also work in the same field at a very large company and can tell you that there is a tremendous amount of time wasted by project mangagers sitting in meetings. I'm well aware of how things are supposed to work.
How's that?
MES, RFID, Storage (NAS/SAN)
I resemble that remark.
I might have some real question for you haha. I admit I rag on security guys a bit much but after having been burned once or twice you get bent out of shape. We had one Security Auditor come in to sniff the network. He got all excited and ran up to our PM screaming that there was ALOT of foreign traffic on our network. We had to calm the guy down and explain to him that he was looking outward at the Internet not internally at our network. He left shortly afterwards.
I wish I had a niclel for every time I've had a "network guy" tell me that "its an application problem, not a network problem", and then be proven wrong -- by the app guy.
Where I work, the best designers/engineers are often passed over because of just this. The bad part is that the best designers/engineers are stuck in a title and cannot get the raise they deserve due to policy. This may not be so in a small shop, but in a large corporation it's par for the course.
As a manager that has overseen the off-shoring of a lot of work - I can tell that managers at my level do not like to send code overseas but it really does not matter - the people that send the code overseas are executive management - they are so far from where the rubber meets the road they could not see the developers and project managers if they had binoculars.
In some respects off-shoring works and in many it does not. While it might save money on a spreadsheet - projects take longer and often go off-track (costing more money). It is hard for executive management to see beyond the bottom line numbers but eventually they will see the light.
Based on off-shoring, my company went from occupying five floors to now occupying one.
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