Driving the enterprise this year is a quest for efficiency and flexibility. To determine the actual direction, one needs quantifiable information that proves certain trends have merit.
The want ads are a great resource for seeing what types of investments are being made by companies. This year, people with virtualization skills are in big demand, followed by -you guessed it – cloud computing.
Forrester Research is predicting that IT spending will jump about 8% but hiring will lag.
According to a post on CIO.com, Wedbush Securities, a Wall Street analyst firm, sees projects involving virtualization, Windows 7 and enterprise software as high on the corporate priority list.
In 2008, Dice.com ran an average of 85,000 job listings. Then Lehman Bros. collapsed and the job market fizzled. Jobs posted took a drop in 2009, falling to a low of 47,000. Today, the count is up to 50,000 and is expected to increase over the span of the year.
The fastest growing skills are for virtualization, which is at about 2,000 ads, up 21% compared to last year. Cloud computing is showing popularity, too. Last year there were zero jobs posted.This year there are more than 300.
Large companies from a number of industries are hiring virtualization pros, showing the demand is not just from technology companies.
IT managers realize that virtualization pros can manage more servers than their counterparts. For example, CIO.com cites a study that found one administrator manages 65 physical servers. The average for virtual servers is 77.
That’s not a huge increase but it can help save IT dollars that can be used to prove whether other growing trends deserve attention.
