Sitting as it does in the shadow of Washington, a metro area with an amazing number of tech companies and government technology initiatives, Baltimore is sometimes overlooked as a center in its own right.

As the year winds down, the city's IT job market is looking stable. Timm Brown, Baltimore branch manager for IT recruiter Sapphire Technologies, calls it "strong," and offers some specific hints to job-seekers. "We are seeing a strong desire for senior architect-level project managers who help with audits and assessments to begin blueprints for new projects," he says. "It's the beginning phase of many projects that will include full life cycle development." Brown adds that job candidates aren't on the market long. Often, they get two to three interviews within the same week and are generally hired within a week. Other hot IT jobs in Baltimore: project/program managers, senior web developers, application developers, and testers.

So far this year, the number of Baltimore job postings on Dice has held steady. In the most recent quarter there was no change at all. Today's Baltimore job hunters have 1,800 opportunities to search on the site.

Which companies are hot? Networking specialist NexTone Communications, one of the area's fastest-growing companies (it's located in Gaithersburg), has job openings for software development engineers, customer deployment engineers and solutions engineers. At BroadSoft, also in Gaithersburg, you'll find opportunities for network administrators, deployment systems engineers, security engineers and interoperability engineers. The company's specialty is VoiP technology.

Broader indicators for Baltimore are looking up. The quarterly Manpower Employment Outlook Survey (which covers all industries), says that from October to December, a robust 44 percent of the companies interviewed plan to hire more staff, according to Manpower spokesperson Michael Pinkasavage. That suggests the city is showing a surge of investment and development.

Statewide, Maryland is growing as a home for high-tech. In the most recent AeA Cyberstates report, Maryland inched up from 13th to 12th place, with 162,000 tech workers and notable growth in telecom, systems design, engineering services and R&D.

Venture capital is also on the rise, Gregory Poersch, Executive Director of the AeA Potomac Council, said in the report. It rose 26 percent in 2007, to $636 million. "The outlook is optimistic for continued high-paying job growth that raises the standard of living and drives the future of Maryland's economy," he wrote.

"Baltimore is going through a major restoration and rebuilding of the city," says Sapphire's Brown. "It's attracting many new companies that are major players in the IT industry." The tech industry will play a significant role in Baltimore's renaissance.