12 IT skills that employers can't say no to...

Mary Brandel outlines some of the areas in demand right now

1. Machine learning As companies work to build software such as collaborative filtering, spam filtering and fraud-detection applications, 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, says Kevin Scott, senior engineering manager at Google.

“There are lots of applications that have big, big, big data sizes, which creates a fundamental problem of how you organise the data and present it to users,” he says.

Demand for these applications is expanding the need for data mining, statistical modelling and data structure skills, among others, Scott says.

2. Mobilising applications

The race to deliver content over mobile devices is akin to the wild days of the internet during the 1990s, says Sean Ebner, vice president of professional services at US recruiter Spherion Pacific Enterprises. And with devices like BlackBerries and Treos becoming more important as business tools, companies will need people who are adept at extending applications such as ERP, procurement and expense approval to these devices, he says.

3. 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 US 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.

4. Human-computer interface

Another area that will see growing demand is human-computer interaction or user interface design, Google’s Scott says. “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, he says, “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 staffing firm Intronic Solutions. “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.”

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 fibre 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 centres to be aware of how their applications are using the network,” he 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 CompTIA’s Hopkins.

“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,” he says.

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.

9. Business intelligence systems

Momentum is also building around business intelligence, Spherion’s 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,” he says.

10. Embedded security

Security professionals have been in high demand in recent years, but today, according to Howard Schmidt, president of the Information Systems Security Association, 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 email server or doing software development. It’s becoming part of the job description,” he says.