Necesssary IT skill

Have you spoken with a high-tech recruiter or
professor of computer science lately? According to
observers across the country, the technology skills
shortage that pundits were talking about a year ago is
real.

"Everything I see in Silicon Valley is completely
contrary to the assumption that programmers are a
dying breed and being offshored," says Kevin Scott,
senior engineering manager at Google and a founding
member of the professions and education boards at the
Association for Computing Machinery. "From big
companies to start-ups, companies are hiring as
aggressively as possible."

Many recruiters say there are more open positions than
they can fill, and according to Kate Kaiser, associate
professor of IT at Marquette University in Milwaukee,
students are getting snapped up before they graduate.
In January, Kaiser asked the 34 students in the
systems analysis and design class she was teaching how
many had already accepted offers to begin work after
graduating in May. Twenty-four students raised their
hands. "I feel sure the other 10 who didn't have
offers at that time have all been given an offer by
now," she says.

Suffice it to say, the market for IT talent is hot,
but only if you have the right skills. If you want to
be part of the wave, take a look at what eight experts
-- including recruiters, curriculum developers,
computer science professors and other industry
observers -- say are the hottest skills of the near
future.

1) Machine learning

As companies work to build software such as
collaborative filtering, spam filtering and
fraud-detection applications that seek patterns in
jumbo-size data sets, some observers are seeing a
rapid increase in the need for people with
machine-learning knowledge, or the ability to design
and develop algorithms and techniques to improve
computers' performance, Scott says.

"It's not just the case for Google," he says. "There
are lots of applications that have big, big, big data
sizes, which creates a fundamental problem of how you
organize the data and present it to users."

Demand for these applications is expanding the need
for data mining, statistical modeling and data
structure skills, among others, Scott says. "You can't
just wave your hand at some of these problems -- there
are subtle differences in how the data structures or
algorithms you choose impacts whether you get a
reasonable solution or not," he explains.

You can acquire machine-learning knowledge either
through job experience or advanced undergraduate or
graduate coursework, Scott says. But no matter how you
do it, "companies are snapping up these skills as fast
as they can grab them," he says.

2) Mobilizing applications

The race to deliver content over mobile devices is
akin to the wild days of the Internet during the '90s,
says Sean Ebner, vice president of professional
services at Spherion Pacific Enterprises, a recruiter
in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. And with devices like
BlackBerries and Treos becoming more important as
business tools, he says, companies will need people
who are adept at extending applications such as ERP,
procurement and expense approval to these devices.
"They need people who can push applications onto
mobile devices," he says.
Wireless networking

With the proliferation of de facto wireless standards
such as Wi-Fi, WiMax and Bluetooth, securing wireless
transmissions is top-of-mind for employers seeking
technology talent, says Neill Hopkins, vice president
of skills development for the Computing Technology
Industry Association (CompTIA). "There's lots of
wireless technologies taking hold, and companies are
concerned about how do these all fit together, and
what are the security risks, which are much bigger
than on wired networks," he says.

"If I were to hire a wireless specialist, I'd also
want them to understand the security implications of
that and build in controls from the front end," agrees
Howard Schmidt, president of the Information Systems
Security Association and former chief information
security officer and chief security strategist at eBay
Inc.

But don't venture into the marketplace with only a
wireless certification, Hopkins warns. "No one gets
hired as a wireless technician -- you have to be a
network administrator with a specialization in
wireless so you know how wireless plays with the
network," he says.

4) Human-computer interface

Another area that will see growing demand is
human-computer interaction or user interface design,
Scott says, which is the design of user interfaces for
the Web or desktop applications. "There's been more
recognition over time that it's not OK for an engineer
to throw together a crappy interface," he says. Thanks
to companies like Apple Inc., he continues, "consumers
are increasingly seeing well-designed products, so why
shouldn't they demand that in every piece of software
they use?"

5) Project management

Project managers have always been in high demand, but
with growing intolerance for over-budget or failed
projects, the ones who can prove that they know what
they're doing are very much in demand, says Grant
Gordon, managing director at Kansas City-based
staffing firm Intronic Solutions Group. "Job reqs are
coming in for 'true project managers,' not just people
who have that denotation on their title," Gordon says.
"Employers want people who can ride herd, make sense
of the project life cycle and truly project-manage. "

That's a big change from a year ago, he says, when it
was easy to fill project management slots. But now,
with employers demanding in-the-trenches experience,
"the interview process has become much tougher,"
Gordon says. "The right candidates are fewer and
farther between, and those that are there can be more
picky on salaries and perks."

The way Gordon screens candidates is by having
on-staff subject-matter experts conduct interviews
that glean how the candidate has handled various
situations in the past, such as conflicting team
responsibilities or problem resolution. "It's easy to
regurgitate what you heard from PMBOK [the Project
Management Institute's Project Management Body of
Knowledge], but when it comes to things like conflict
management, you start seeing whether they know what
they're doing."
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In one case, Gordon asked a candidate to describe how
he'd go about designing a golf ball that goes farther
by changing the dimples on the ball. "No one has the
answer to questions like that, but it shows how they
think on their feet and how they can break down a
problem that's pretty ambiguous into smaller
segments," he says.

6) General networking skills

No matter where you work in IT, you can no longer
escape the network, and that has made it crucial for
non-networking professionals, such as software
engineers, to have some basic understanding of
networking concepts, Scott says. At the very least,
they should brush up on networking basics, such as
TCP/IP, Ethernet and fiber optics, he says, and have a
working knowledge of distributed and networked
computing.

"There's an acute need for people writing applications
deployed in data centers to be aware of how their
applications are using the network," Scott says. "They
need to understand how to take advantage of the
network in their application design." For instance, to
split three-tier applications among multiple machines,
developers need to know how to build and coordinate
that network. "People who understand basic distributed
systems principles are very valuable," Scott says.

7) Network convergence technicians

With more companies implementing voice over IP,
there's a growing demand for network administrators
who understand all sorts of networks -- LANs, WANs,
voice, the Internet -- and how they all converge
together, according to Hopkins.

"When something needs to be fixed, companies don't
want the network administrator to say, 'Oh, that's a
phone problem,' and the phone guy to say, 'Call the
networking guy,' " Hopkins says. "Our research has
validated that there's a huge demand for people who've
been in the phone world and understand what the IT
network is, or someone managing the IT network who
understands the voice network and how it converges."

8) Open-source programming

There's been an uptick in employers interested in
hiring open- source talent, Ebner says. "Some people
thought the sun was setting on open source, but it's
coming back in a big way, both at the operating system
level and in application development, " he says. People
with experience in Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP,
collectively referred to as LAMP, will find themselves
in high demand, he says.

Scott Saunders, dean of career services at DeVry
University in Southern California, is seeing the same
trend. "Customer dissatisfaction and security concerns
are driving this phenomenon, especially in the
operating system and database markets," he says.

9) Business intelligence systems

Momentum is also building around business
intelligence, Ebner says, creating demand for people
who are skilled in BI technologies such as Cognos,
Business Objects and Hyperion, and who can apply those
to the business.

"Clients are making significant investments in
business intelligence, " Ebner says. "But they don't
need pure technicians creating scripts and queries. To
be a skilled data miner, you need hard-core functional
knowledge of the business you're trying to dissect."
People who can do both "are some of the hottest talent
in the country right now," he says.
10) Embedded security

Security professionals have been in high demand in
recent years, but today, according to Schmidt, there's
a surge in employers looking for security skills and
certifications in all their job applicants, not just
the ones for security positions.

"In virtually every job description I've seen in the
last six months, there's been some use of the word
security in there," he says. "Employers are asking for
the ability to create a secure environment, whether
the person is running the e-mail server or doing
software development. It's becoming part of the job
description. "

This, Schmidt says, mirrors the trend toward
integrating security into companies' day-to-day
operations rather than considering it an add-on role
performed by a specialist. Companies will still need
security specialists and subject-matter experts,
Schmidt says, but more and more, every IT person a
company hires will have to have an understanding of
the security ramifications of his area.

Hopkins echoes that sentiment. "Every single
certification we do now has an element of security
built in," he says. "We keep getting feedback from the
market researchers that security touches everything
and everyone. Even an entry-level technician better
understand security."

Saunders says DeVry University has responded to this
demand by adding a security curriculum to some of its
campuses throughout the U.S. "Companies are
increasingly interested in protecting their assets
against cyberterrorism and internal threats," he says.

11) Digital home technology integration

Homes are increasingly becoming high-tech havens, and
there has been enormous growth in the home video and
audio markets, and in home security and automated
lighting systems. But who installs these systems, and
who fixes them when something goes wrong?

To answer that question, CompTIA developed a
certification in cooperation with the Consumer
Electronics Association, called Digital Home
Technology Integrator. "It's the hottest and most
vibrant market we've seen in a long time," Hopkins
says.

12) .Net, C #, C ++, Java -- with an edge

Recruiters and curriculum developers are seeing job
orders come in for a range of application frameworks
and languages, including ASP.Net, VB.net, XML, PHP,
Java, C#, and C++, but according to Gordon, employers
want more than just a coder. "Rarely do they want
people buried behind the computer who aren't part of a
team," he says. "They want someone with Java who can
also be a team lead or a project coordinator. "