| April 2007 |
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| From telecom and finance to healthcare, there are plenty of places to look for good jobs |
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| When the Center for Digital Government conducted its 2006 Digital Cities Survey to find those city governments that are utilizing digital technologies to better serve their citizens and streamline operations, San Diego came in at number seven for cities with populations of 250,000 or more. That's one indicator of the tech-friendly environment that IT experts find as they work to take their careers to the next level.
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Who's hiring? Dan Cordero, regional manager for IT recruiter Sapphire Technologies, says many industries are good places to look, including new media, telecom, financial services, local government, medical devices and healthcare. Job skills in demand include: .NET developers, infrastructure experts, SQL server database developers and DBAs, QA, telecom engineers, project managers, systems administrators, business analysts, Unix administrators, SAP, Java developers, security experts, Oracle developers, and DBAs. One important hint from Cordero: don’t forget about San Diego's massive defense industry.
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| 21% of San Diego CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter |
| - Robert Half Technology's second-quarter IT Hiring Index |
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For example, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a systems solutions and technical services company involved in all kinds of defense-related efforts plus logistics and product support, space and earth sciences, and global commercial services, has 144 job positions listed. BAE Systems, a provider of advanced defense and aerospace systems, has several positions open for software engineers. (It's important to remember that security clearances are often needed for employment in defense-related jobs).
Another way to find hot job titles is to study the job listings of the city's most successful companies. Business 2.0 magazine identified Qualcomm as one of San Diego's fastest-growing companies, and its career web site seems to back up the finding, with more than 600 San Diego-based jobs available, everything from business systems analysts and senior programmers to software engineers and web UI developers. Job hunters may also want to take a look at Kintera, a provider of social constituent relationship management systems, which tops the list of the fastest-growing companies in San Diego over the past five years, according to Deloitte & Touche's San Diego Technology Fast 50 listings.
And Qualcomm isn't alone. IT staffing consultancy Robert Half Technology, whose second-quarter IT Hiring Index was just released, finds that a strong 21% of San Diego CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter. The quarterly Manpower Employment Outlook Survey finds that from April to June, 41% of the companies interviewed plan to hire more employees, according to Manpower spokesperson Phil Blair.
At Dice, the number of available job listings rose just 1% overall for the first quarter, but interestingly, that's the result of a powerful January/February surge followed by an equally powerful March tumble. Perhaps the spring and summer seasons will offer a bit more stability. At least salaries are trending in the right direction. In the 2006 Dice Salary Survey, IT salaries in San Diego were up an average of 10.05% over 2005 to $79,416, the biggest leap among all the cities Dice tracks.
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