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High-impact tech talent in high demand

Prospects for IT professionals with technical skills and domain and industry knowledge appear limitless

By Jim Lanzalotto, Computerworld, 03/05/07

It's no secret that today's hiring managers need high-impact talent with technical skills and practitioners with domain and industry knowledge. However, the demand for these professionals is quickly draining the talent pipeline. Simply put, there aren't enough candidates with the necessary skills to fill the number of positions available in today's IT job market.

This shortage is leaving hiring managers hard-pressed to find candidates with the right combination of skills and industry expertise. As a result, they will be forced to wade deeper and deeper into the talent pool to find them.

Some factors contributing to the struggle to find top talent include the recent healthy economy and low unemployment rates. Last year, the domestic unemployment rate hit a five-year low. And this year will be just as robust, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In January 2007, the unemployment rate was a mere 4.6 percent, with total employment hitting 146 million.

On the flip side, IT professionals now have the upper hand in this relationship. In a recent employer survey by CareerBuilder.com, nearly half of the respondents said they expected to increase salaries this year. One-sixth of those surveyed said they expected the increase to be 5 percent or more. Still, many of today's hiring managers don't expect astronomical salaries and absurd perk packages of the dot-com era to once again become the norm. However, companies with the foresight to implement savvy recruiting and retention practices today will benefit as the IT talent pool continues to shrink.

It's simple supply and demand economics. With a limited number of professionals with technical skills available, hiring managers are forced to stretch their budgets and place an increased emphasis on wages and compensation packages to obtain top-caliber talent.

Wages in the pressure cooker

The demand for IT talent is growing at a steady rate, driving wages in the technology field higher each quarter. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the technology sector is expected to grow at an average of 18 percent to 26 percent in the period from 2004 through 2014.

These numbers are in line with Yoh's research. The Yoh Index of Technology Wages, a quarterly compensation index that many Fortune 500 companies use to determine salary scales, shows that technology wages increased 1.2 percent by the middle of last year's fourth quarter and ended with a 3.1 percent increase in December, when compared to the same months in 2005. This rise is expected to continue through 2007.

By the end of last year, the technology sector continued to demonstrate solid year-over-year growth. What job seekers can expect in 2007 is strong demand for project managers, biostatiticians, business objects managers, firmware engineers, hardware engineers, Java developers, mechanical designers, Microsoft developers (.Net, C#), Oracle consultants, Oracle database administrators, SAP consultants, SAS programmers, and systems architects.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.