« Something I should have done already | Main | Here's a label for you: Person »

Are your skills hot or cold

If you're in IT, you already know about the skills treadmill—the need for constant learning to keep your skills relevant (not to mention the learning curve associated with new versions). Marianne Kolbasuk McGee has an article for Information Week on the hottest tech skills today (via WirelessJobs.com). If your skills are on her cold list, you might want to do an upgrade of your own.

Skills that will be in declining demand over the next two to five years include programming and routine coding, systems testing, application maintenance, technical support, data continuity, and recovery. Those skills are among jobs that are increasingly being offshored.

Hot areas?
Applications developers with customer-facing skills are hot in general right now, but especially hot are rapid application developers and extreme programmers who are among those getting the highest premiums—about an extra 16% added to base pay.

...

Other hot skills include SAP application development, wireless expertise, storage area networking, and RFID. There's also increased demand for "hybrid talent" such as people who have operations experience as well as technology skills.

If you lean to the creative side, there are opportunities related to Web 2.0 and interactive marketing. Funny how technology touches everything now.

Tags:

TrackBack

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Are your skills hot or cold:

» What Do Sales an IT Have In Common: The Treadmill Dilemma from CharlotteRecruiting
Nathan Gilliatt muses on the problem of the Skills Treadmill. IT workers need to keep their skills up-to-date to get hired for the next project, but are paid to work because of skills they already have.If you're in IT, you [Read More]

Comments (2)

Nathan - thanks for the unsolicited link!

BTW - like the look of the new blog!

Dennis

Thanks, Dennis! Credit where credit is due, you know.

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)