Companies are now making a gradual recovery from the global recession. The IT industry was severely affected during the economic crisis and had to go through a period of a hiring freeze, and in some cases even cutting down on staff. But now the companies are recovering and people with IT skills are back in demand. The importance of different IT skills changes over time. For example, HTML was a desirable skill a few years back but that is not the case now. Here is a list of some of the most popular IT skills in demand today.
Wireless networking and security: A Robert Half Technology survey conducted in 2010, in which 1400 CIOs participated, reveals that a job requiring networking skills is the hardest to fill in. We are living in a world where local networks are quickly dropping the idea of a traditional ethernet cable and moving on to wireless solutions. But wireless networks bring with them security risks of a different kind. For this reason, people having good network security skills are in great demand.
Business Intelligence: The world we live in generates data at an enormous rate. There are methods now that enable you to access and store large amounts of data. But the problem is not the storage of the data. It is analyzing the data and making sense of it. Business intelligence deals with this area. It helps in understanding and meaningfully representing all this data.
Programming: A good programmer is always in demand in the IT industry. A survey conducted by Computerworld in 2010 revealed that almost 50% of the companies that participated in it were looking for people with good programming skills. The IT industry has grown at a very rapid pace over the years. To sustain this rapid growth, companies need to come up with technological innovations. For doing this, they need good programmers and application developers.
Project management: IT companies might have to handle numerous projects at any given time and for that, they divide their workforce into teams. To make sure that these teams work properly, they need to have a good project leader. There are many cases of projects not meeting their deadlines or going overboard with their budgets. Companies now require people who can comfortably handle conflicts and pressure situations. It has become very important for companies to have good project managers for smooth completion of their projects.
Mobile technology: During the past couple of years, smartphones have become very popular. For a lot of professionals, they are becoming the preferred mode of accessing the web. They are also used to perform a lot of work previously reserved for a computer. With the growing use of mobile computing, companies are looking for people efficient in mobile technology. Android and Apple smartphones have opened up an entirely new market of application development for mobile platform and companies are trying to capitalize on this.
Technical Support: According to Microsoft, only 20% of their customers have moved to the Windows 7 operating system. This means that 80% are working on old platforms. Windows 7 is becoming a standard choice and so technical support will be required to help companies move to this new platform. Also, the use of IT is increasing in other industries as well. Use of EHR (electronic health records) in healthcare industry is one such example. To make sure that such changes happen smoothly industries will require IT support staff.
HCI (human – computer interface): The way in which we interact with computers has changed dramatically over the years. From using punch cards in the 70’s to the touch screen today, we have come a long way. Products like the iPhone and tablet PC have taken the interface design to an entirely new level. Companies want to give their customers innovative yet easy to use interfaces. That is why skilled professionals in the field of HCI are in great demand.
Open source: Companies would like to use open source technologies as they are free to use. But handling them is a bit difficult as compared to standard software. Recently, Linux has gained a lot of popularity as an operating system and people skilled in using open source platforms like MySQL and PHP are in great demand.
