Finding Qualified People

Prior to the economic downturn in late 2008, the challenge we most commonly heard was the inability to find enough skilled personnel. During that period there were as many as 1.3 million unfilled tech jobs in the U.S. market. As the economy sank, so did that number, to a low of just over 200,000 open positions in the second half of 2009. And as we've seen a recovery to a number close to half of a recent high water mark, the comments about not having access to a large enough pool of quality talent is starting to reemerge in three main areas.

Security Professionals
This group of individuals really breaks down into three buckets of need. First you have the front line personnel monitoring desktop, notebook and light network security. Their job is to ensure that company security policies and procedures are being upheld and followed. Next you have the network security professional who monitors firewalls and SPAM filters, checks logs, controls switches and might be taking on mobile app security integration. The third group are offensive security experts who do ethical hacking, penetration testing and, in the case of DoD, NSA and some large Fortune 500 companies, counter offensive cyber warfare. CompTIA helps provide certification of skills for the first two groups and experience and experimentation for the last.

Systems Integration
Now more than ever, the person who can bring together CRM, cloud, document management, project management, ERP and other systems is in high demand and significant shortage. Think about all that's changed in the last few years in terms of the new platforms that have become mainstream so quickly, and you recognize the challenges companies are facing. No one company is providing best-of-breed across multiple applications and companies aren't settling for "it's good enough" in a one-size fits all platform. They want customization and they want it to work. This is also an area that doesn't always require deep technical proficiency as much as the skill set is about understanding business processes and requirements.

Mobility Applications
As I've written before, we have a small (phone), medium (tablet) and large (desktop / notebook) computing environment today. And even in the large paradigm, there's a huge dependency on mobility of data. Cloud service will continue to evolve, bandwidth will continue to increase, and processing power will continue to follow Moore's Law. The savvy programmer who can stay on top of all these innovations and change and at the same time create stunning user interfaces will have a tremendous career for years to come.

These are three areas but not the only ones. Even a gradual recovery in the economy will lead to even more severe shortages for IT and tech talent in the short run, so if you have great people in these three areas, do everything you can to hold on to them!