With worldwide IT spend poised to grow a whopping 7% in 2011, according to Gartner, we asked our expert panel for their predictions of hiring trends in 201- and the hot skills:
IT sector in the sweet spot
The IT sector as a whole has shown some of the strongest growth for both permanent and temporary jobs, ranking in the top two sectors in every month of 2011. We agree with Gartner that IT will probably be one of the strongest areas for job growth in the UK economy in the coming years.
Business analysts are hot The REC’s monthly Report on Jobs shoes consistent demand for business analysts throughout 2011, suggesting that companies are looking to boost their efficiency in preparation for rapid growth. July’s Report on Jobs found demand running high for workers with knowledge of .NET, PHP, SAP and Oracle. Designers with CAD skills were also sought.
Andrew Tomlinson, technology policy adviser to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation
Data miners are gold dust “The move towards online business models is driving a huge spike in demand for data analysis skills around business analytics. There just aren’t enough people available with the skills needed to analyse the data. We’re not just talking about numeracy and computer science – tomorrow’s analysts will need other skills to be able to extract insights from their existing data.
Enter natural language processing Social media and the gathering of consumer behaviour through text-based data rather than purely numeric information is the future. - IBM for example has just launched the SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench, which will use natural language processing (NLP) to analyse everything from product names and industry jargon to slang and emoticons.
Move over .NET
Across the wider commercial market, we are expecting to see the decommissioning of .Net 2.0 in major blue chips who will be moving towards .Net 3.5 and .Net 4 with emphasis on WCF and WPF, specifically focused on Silverlight technologies and increasing functionality of the GIU driving demand for skill sets in these areas.
Dustin Smith, Senior Consultant – Twenty Technology:
Swift move to SOA “We will see a continued and rapid transition to service orientated architectures (SOA), web-based applications along with investment in grid computing and remote access capabilities. This is aimed at giving the user a richer experience and the ability to work flexibly by accessing IT systems over the web.
SOA support act
• Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), C# and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) from Microsoft
• Flex, Spring, EJB 3.0, Hibernate and Java from Oracle and the open source community
• Developers, technical engineers and infrastructure engineers will be other popular roles to address these changes.
Charlie Luckhoo, associate director at McGregor Boyall
Refresh programmes dominate
“Look out for continued growth of ecommerce, large refresh programmes to automate clients’ processes and streamline internal processes. We also expect to see a continued growth in mobile, interactive and digital technology. This is line with our clients’ need to compete in a highly competitive, dynamic and ever-changing market place.
Cloud momentum builds
“Our clients are looking for candidates with experience of Agile methodologies. Demand for candidates to fulfil project delivery roles remains high, including project managers, business analysts, developers, testers and quality assurance. With the momentum towards cloud technologies we are witnessing an increase in demand for candidates with these skills, or alternatively skills in hosting and outsourcing.
Financial services focus
Client demand is in the following areas:
• Improving efficiency for straight through processing and real time trading
• Projects around single data hubs for straight through processing
• Improving market data feeds
Simon Taylor, director, Venn Group
Search CWJobs for
1000ss of Internet jobs,
business analyst and
Silverlight jobs 