The Job Market’s Irresistible Attractions

July 9, 2012 Dan Burger

Big recruiting companies, like Dice, keep themselves in the news by continually collecting information from their clients–companies on the search for skilled employees and talented individuals looking for work–and then packaging that data for the media. It’s one of the key elements of content marketing, and Dice is very good at it.

When jobs are your business, and so many people want a job or a different job, your information is in demand, especially if the information pertains to hiring trends (sorry, not this month) or the most sought after skills. (Bingo!)

If you have these skills, you might want to shop yourself around–particularly if you are feeling overworked and underpaid. It may take you 10 years of miniscule raises to equal the bump in salary a new job brings. And even though it’s not like the good old days, there are companies that are looking to pirate IT talent from smaller markets, just like we see in Major League Baseball or other high-profile professional sports.

So, here we go with a top 10 IT skills list. If you’ve got the smarts in these areas, you get the “most likely to succeed” designation. And if you are unskilled or moderately skilled in these areas, a little extra effort in one of these directions could put you in a better place.

According to Dice, the most desirable skill-sets for IT professionals looking for work are . . . Java developer . . . mobile developer . . . .NET developer . . . security . . . SAP . . . Sharepoint . . . Web developer . . . active federal security clearance . . . and network engineer.

In February, Dice released a similar report, but in comparison mobile developers, .NET developers, and people with SAP skills have moved up the list. Project managers and business analysts have fallen out of the top 10.

Hiring managers and recruiters mention the top three on the new list with double or triple the frequency, the Dice report claims.

Alice Hill, a managing director at Dice, says, “Many of the top 10 positions have figured prominently on the list each time we’ve asked America’s tech hiring managers and recruiters for their toughest openings to fill. This raises a particular question: Why isn’t the market fixing the talent gaps?”

Mobile computing, for example, is so hot right now that projects are outstripping the supply of talent. Mobile is even responsible for creating holes in other areas as some of the talented software developers move to this hot new area after leaving their former jobs vacant.

Other considerations that Hill suggests are having an effect include the shift in training responsibilities from the company to the individuals, an emphasis on workplace experience–two to five years being most desirable and six to 10 years also in the favorable range–and not enough people with the skills and experience in this narrow range to fill the positions available.

If you carried this over to the IBM i environment, you’d find a very small number of folks with strong skills and fewer than 10 years of work experience. Those that do fit that demographic should find themselves in a good position. And companies that are too narrow in their definitions may have to consider older employees, which by the way are probably less likely to job hop every three years like a younger employees do.