IT Skills in demand in UK

No one is mistaking the current IT jobs market for the one that sizzled during the dot-com days and inflated salaries to astronomical rates. But despite the U.K. economy wrestles with a weak housing market and slowing growth, demand for IT workers is still strong, especially for IT jobs in London.
There is a distinct shortage of certain IT skills, the highest for a decade and that shortage seems to be growing," says Neill Hopkins, vice president of skills development at The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA).
Overall according to a National Computing Centre report, demand for IT professionals is 7% greater than the people available and 2.8% greater than last year. The talent shortage is being exacerbated by dramatic declines in enrolments in university computer science programs, along with the first trickle of baby boomers starting to head for retirement, thus specific skills shortages are weighing heavily on CIOs' minds.

Regarding the current hot skills in the market, several surveys have been released recently. Web 2.0, .Net, Java and wireless -- skills in technologies that enable end users to engage and communicate with each other -- are hot according to Rich Milgram, CEO of online job portal Beyond.com. At the same time network and security skills are becoming more and more important, especially as companies expose more and more of their networks and data to the world.
To add to this, the 8 skills in demand for IT Jobs in London, according to a survey launched by CompTIA are:

1. Programming and application development jobs arrive in first positions for IT jobs in London. As companies continue to Web-enable their existing applications and plow deeper into Web 2.0, demand is red-hot right now for people with AJAX, .Net and PHP skills,

2. CIOs are hungry for project managers who have extensive experience overseeing complex efforts that have delivered clear business benefits -- not just someone who has obtained a Project Management Professional (PMP) qualification.

3. Help desk/technical support are still very popular IT jobs in London despite the outsourcing growth. As companies continue to expand their application portfolios, more help desk and technical support experts will be needed to support those systems. Demand for support staff will remain strong as commercial applications from vendors such as IBM and Microsoft continue to become more complex, notes CompTIA's Hopkins. The national average salary for PC Support staff is running at £19,000 (£20,000 in London) while Senior PC Support personnel can expect to earn £23,000 (£25,000 in London).

4. There will always be demand for IT professionals with core security credentials, such as intrusion-detection capabilities and government security clearances, but database and wireless security projects will drive that demand even higher this year.

5. There has been a flurry of activity among companies and government agencies to upgrade or relocate their data centers to take advantage of virtualization and other recent data automation and efficiency gains.

6. As IT organizations strive to align more closely with the businesses they support, demand remains strong for people with business acumen, whether they're specialized business analysts, business liaisons or application developers and other technicians with business-specific knowledge

7. Finally all sorts of networking skills are hot right now, including general network administration capabilities and network convergence, wireless and network security talents, as organizations collapse their voice and data networks with wireless and voice-over-IP technologies.

On the other hand other skills are losing their appeal. According to says Brian Jones, manager of network engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, there is less need for system-side knowledge. Skills in programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran, PowerBuilder, Delphi and more don’t rate like they once did. But above all, the skill area expected to decline the most in importance is hardware.

The trend is for IT professionals to emerge from being specialists in one technology area to being team members with broad knowledge of the environment. As networks and systems grow more sophisticated and intertwined with each other and the business, IT staff are expected to be well-versed in many areas and able to apply that know-how to the business at hand. The impact of the global credit crunch on IT has yet to be seen, but the perception is that IT is an unstoppable juggernaut that will vanquish even something like a downturn in the global economy. According to a survey ordered by Elan, the market is in need of well rounded IT skills, rather than just IT professionals with specific tools. Elan added that job seekers also needed to keep on top of training and skills if they wanted to get ahead.