1/20/10

Top 10 Technology Skills in Demand in 2010

A slowly reviving economy will have organizations hiring in a few key areas, looking for IT pros with a mix of skills

1. PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Good avenue for technology professionals interested in building up their careers. Professionals who understand technology and how it fits in the overall business strategy are the ones who add the most value, get paid more and have the most fulfilling careers.

2. SECURITY
Demand for security skills. The biggest threat to companies is breaches by their own staff. When you throw in changes to the staff and disgruntled employees losing their benefits or facing the threat of being laid off, you increase the chances of network fraud or security infringement.
Big push to hire people with cyberskills. As leaders in your companies you'll worry about things like passwords. Making sure you support complex passwords.

3. NETWORK ADMINISTRATION
The network will be a big area of focus in the coming year. Increased use of video and voice over IP network by voice and radio engineers to handle upgrades and ensure compliance with new federal mandates. Those mandates requires the company to move from wideband to narrowband radio frequencies. Network Admin will be dabbling with a converged infrastructure in the next 12 months, driving a need for people with a mix of server, software and networking skills to support networked storage and server devices contained in a single chassis. It will be a tech who knows EMC, Hitachi storage,knows server, storage, and networking all in one device. The network has a problem when traced down, the problem is due to a lock on a table in the storage device.

4. VIRTUALIZATION - CLOUD is likely connected to the growing complexity of networks and to the stresses placed on them by virtualization and newly popular approaches to application delivery, such as cloud computing and software as a service.

5. BUSINESS ANALYSIS
As a "liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate, and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies, and information systems. IT pros are good candidates for Business Analysis jobs because they have a broad perspective of a company's business.

6. BUSINESS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT
Business process improvement or management pros use BPM techniques and technologies to help companies optimize their business processes. BPMinstitute.org, which describes itself as a peer-to-peer exchange for business process management professionals.

7. WEB DEVELOPMENT
Specifically, companies will look for developers with knowledge of .Net, Java, Web development, open source and portal technologies such as Microsoft Corp.'s Sharepoint, Ruby on Rails, AJAX, and Silver notes.

8. DATABASE MANAGEMENT
Databases are the hearts of key business systems that drive payroll, manufacturing, sales, transaction processing, and more. Programmers must be able to build programs that quickly and efficiently interface with the database management system (DBMS), while database administrators "must be able to bring the full power of database features to bear on business problems. DBA expertise can be the Achilles' heel of database projects - many IT projects have failed due to the inability to secure DBA talent or successfully address DBA issues. The major database vendors are Oracle, IBM and Sybase.

9. WINDOWS ADMINISTRATION
Microsoft shops are expected in 2010 to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Windows 7 client, and perhaps install Exchange Server 2010 and Share Point 2010 as well. Windows administration skills is going to be key for many enterprises implementing and maintaining existing and upgraded systems.

10. DESKTOP SUPPORT
The need for support technicians tends to reflect general business conditions. Desktop/Technical Support It's no surprise that there will be strong demand for the people who make the help desk hum in 2010.