For me the big ones will be Engineers in the IT and EE fields, as well as Project Manegement Engineers. A PME can practically write his own ticket. But, all must be US citizens.
Put it this way. Isn't it nice that you don't have to send your car back to the plant in order to get an oil change? The best tech jobs in the US are the ones where your physical presence is required.
Well all I can say is, after 11 years dedicated to distributed large scale enterprise type systems... I can't seem to find anyone willing to pay for that experience... I am making more money being a low level coder at this point than truly utilizing my skills and assets... but what can ya do?
My advice is do as I did: learn to use a keypunch machine. You're set for life.
I don't know if this counts as a "tech skill," but someone who has skills as a technical writer can probably do very well in almost any economic climate.
Application development is going to be the largest growth sector in my opinion.
These are the developers who build customized solutions for small and medium sized companies. At the moment the offshore companies have a huge price advantage because a lot of the coding for these specialized solutions had to be done from the ground up for each customer.
The advantage should shift back to domestic professionals as the lengthy, labor intensive stages are cut short by rapid development tools that are slowly reaching their maturity. Open Source software such as MySQL, Apache, and the middleware languages like PHP and Perl have also reached, at the latter half of 2005, the required feature sets to really challenge companies like Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft for the smaller enterprise markets. At least, insofar, as development friendliness by a large number of competing professionals, which will drive down the cost, increase the number of solutions, and in two years will put the United States at the undisputed front of the pack for our strength in the small and medium sized business capabilities.
Hot for elsewhere. I'm "in" the industry and have been for over 20 years. What's hot? None of the above.
Developers (Dime a Dozen)
Security (most "security experts" can't secure their own PC's)
Project Managers (dime a dozen)
Where's it at. Well were it's always been the boring, slog work performed by your friendly Administrators everyday. You too can have a unglamorous career doing:
Storage Resource Management
Network Systems Management
Network Load and Bandwidth analysis
Server implementation for the 200th crappy application your CTO has purchased.
The grunt work of the IT industry can be yours. Bore your friends with exciting explanations of storage trending, Service Level agreements and network card thresholds. Explain to your wife for the one thousand time what you do for a living and get that confused blank look. Get excited when your parents ask for the "final" time when you are going to get that real job (a lawyer I think)
Honestly I love my career but I've seen these "HOT" fields come and go so often. I've never been umemployed and don't plan on starting now.
Why is there a need for project managers? It seems like all these people do is go to meetings. They produce nothing of value. An on the ball designer/engineer can handle the job themselves.
bump
Hopefully SAP development will be a hot commodity in Spring 06...
Got the word a few months backt that my current development job will be going to India.
There are a lot of unfilled openings in the US. Good people are hard to find. Right now my little department has four openings, out of a staff of eight.
The idea of doing corporate development in India has not worked out as well as expected. They're out of the loop, and quick turnaround is not possible. I spent my morning helping some guy in India deploy his application on a server in the UK for the use of US-based testers. He can't even access the application he wrote because of security issues. SOX makes it difficult to get access for offshore developers.
-bc
Speaking of hot technical skills, I was once a diesel fitter at a pantyhose factory. I'd pull samples off the line, hold them up for inspection, then shout, "Diesel fitter!"
Sadly, the factory closed, and I'm now working as a sundial at a nudist colony...
It's safe to say that optimists and pessimists will come down the issue in their own way.
Managers don't like to send code overseas. Overseas coders aren't very happy about changes and managers love to change specs more than they love to eat. The giant sucking sound doesn't really exist in IT as much as everyone thinks.
Security clearance is hot now as well.
What tech skills are HOT for 2006? People who can count up to twenty withouot taking off their shoes.