| May 2007 |
| A new survey of CIOs reveals which IT jobs are hot, and which types of training will best advance your IT career. Know what to pursue and what to beware of in the evolving IT job market. |
| By Mathew Schwartz |
Which IT jobs are hot, and which types of training will best advance your IT career?
According to a recent survey of 281 IT leaders with hiring authority, companies in 2007 are especially looking for IT professionals with project management, security and architecture skills, as well as strong interpersonal abilities. The study of small, medium and large organizations, conducted by Forrester Research, also found that many organizations plan to train existing personnel to rectify current skills shortages, and increasingly, outsource their more commoditized IT tasks.
Based on these trends, which IT skills should you pursue to best compete in the IT job marketplace?
Wanted: Security and Project Managers
For starters, security personnel are in especially short supply as organizations increasingly prioritize security to help them better manage risks, effectively comply with numerous regulations, and avoid data breaches. The lack of security professionals is driving “a mad rush for qualified IT security talent,” says Forrester Research analyst Samuel Bright. Indeed, 31% of companies plan to hire more security personnel in 2007.
Of all the IT skill shortages, however, the project manager shortfall may be the most acute. This year, one-quarter of IT leaders plan to hire new project managers, and almost two-thirds will provide project management training for current employees.
For project management jobs, companies aren’t just seeking technologists able to color-code project milestones on spreadsheets. Instead, effective candidates typically have much more cross-functional capabilities. As Bright notes, “IT’s reputation and value to the business is largely influenced by its ability to deliver projects and meeting business requirements on time and on budget.”
Yet IT personnel who have the ability to balance technology, business and project management concerns can be scarce. “IT staff, particularly those in more technical roles, often struggle to transition into project management roles due to insufficient training, experience and business knowledge,” he says. Thus, project managers who can also “talk business” are in special demand.
Top Skills For Which Organizations Will Hire |
(by % of organizations) |
Security |
31% |
Project management |
26% |
Network management |
26% |
Infrastructure architecture |
25% |
EA and design skills |
24% |
Business process skills |
19% |
Risk management |
14% |
Source: Forrester Research |
Training Tomorrow’s Talent
Beyond hiring, CIOs expect to acquire needed skills by devoting substantial resources to training existing staff. Top training priorities — for more than half of all organizations — include project management, change management, service management, business process skills, and vendor or sourcing management. Almost half of all organizations will also offer risk management, enterprise architecture, account management, financial management and security training.
Also hot: More than one-third of organizations will train existing employees on application maintenance management, infrastructure architecture and network management. Finally, about one-quarter of organizations will train developers to improve their legacy programming skills.
To manage training costs, some organizations are utilizing innovative tactics to negotiate better discounts with training providers. “One of the interesting things I saw was a smaller IT shop banding together with several other small IT shops to artificially create scale, then running a course for all those IT employees,” says Bright.
Commodity Jobs Increasingly Outsourced
While IT hiring and training trends are strong, organizations’ increased focus on deploying technology to solve specific business problems means some technology skills are fast becoming commoditized, and thus prone to being outsourced. Top outsourcing priorities for CIOs this year include legacy programming, network management, and application maintenance and support.
For on-staff IT employees handling these tasks who worry about job security, note the outsourcing trend carries substantial caveats. For example, “in our survey, IT leaders identified network management as both a top hiring (26%) and a top outsourcing priority (17%) for this year,” says Bright. “Essentially, IT leaders will outsource when an internal staff would be too expensive to do only routine deployment, configuration and maintenance.”
As companies outsource more IT functions, however, oversight requirements also increase. Indeed, CIOs still need to “architect and secure what has already been outsourced, as well as manage the network implications of security and automation,” notes Bright. To handle these sensitive tasks, they expect to utilize full-time employees.
Some Skills Stay Hot
What about long-term IT career planning? Whatever the short-term trends, Bright says the following roles will be in demand for some time:
- Project management
- Enterprise architecture
- IT compliance
- Information security
- Interpersonal and communication skills
Beyond these specific skills, however, companies are also desperately seeking IT employees with “a broad portfolio of experiences and expertise that they can draw from, as well as a knowledge of the underlying business, and the financial implications of — and IT’s impact on — the business’s bottom line,” notes Bright. Job candidates able to offer that combination will always be a hot ticket.
Interpersonal Skills: Don’t Embarrass the CIO
If there’s any one “secret sauce” to building a successful IT career, however, CIOs say it’s interpersonal skills. In particular, they want to hire candidates with top-notch communication, teamwork, problem solving, decision-making, planning, prioritizing and goal-setting capabilities. Yet executives see a dearth of candidates with these aptitudes; many blame undergraduate computer course curriculum.
If soft skills are so important, how do interviewers generally assess them? While some organizations simply rely on “gut checks,” says Bright, increasingly interviewees are being asked to describe presentations they’ve previously given and to detail how they managed audience reactions. Some firms even ask job candidates to give an actual presentation to in-house technology and business managers.
Expect soft skills to keep growing in importance, especially because IT leaders are trying to improve the IT department’s profile, and they don’t want individual employees embarrassing them or the department. “Even the most technical people must surface and deal with business users,” notes Bright. “So as IT’s reputation becomes more of a concern, and the impact of an individual on that reputation becomes more of a concern, you can expect the focus on these interpersonal skills to grow.”
Mathew Schwartz is a freelance business and technology journalist based in Cambridge, Mass.
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