The fast changing Information Technology environment means that the skills demand in industry seldom stays the same very long. <\/p>\n
The international nature of the online and computing field further means that one should keep a close eye on worldwide trends to optimize employability and to stay abreast of the latest trends.<\/p>\n
We take a look at which jobs and skills are currently hot property.<\/p>\n
South Africa<\/strong><\/p>\n In a recent IBM presentation, high level skills were cited as being the biggest challenge in South Africa. These skills include WebSphere, Tivoli, Business Process Analyst, Database Administrators, Functional Process Analyst, and System Administrators for Linux, Unix and Intel.<\/p>\n Application development and maintenance, business and security analysts, data mining and network engineers are all skills which are in great demand in South Africa.<\/p>\n Another fast growing field is telecoms, which is starting to take off due to a more liberalized market. More companies are looking at building their own networks, and telecoms engineers and networking specialists – especially IP and NGN specialists – are in constant demand.<\/p>\n Considering this, it is not surprising that employees with skills in the fields of enterprise architecture and SOA, ERP, project management, security systems, network, data \/ VPN \/ firewalls and telecommunications equipment & services can demand the highest salaries in the local IT space.<\/p>\n Australia<\/strong><\/p>\n The Australian body representing specialized ICT recruitment agencies, ITCRA, recently released a skills match report. This report supplied ‘real job’ data on skills monitoring in the Australian ICT industry.<\/p>\n This report shows that for the middle of 2007, Windows related positions had the largest demand, followed by project-related positions, Microsoft skills, business analysts and SQL related positions. Other popular skills included Java, C and web management.<\/p>\n The largest proportion of placements was for helpdesk and support technicians, followed by business analysts and project managers.<\/p>\n United Kingdom<\/strong><\/p>\n According to IT Jobs Watch in the UK the most sought after skills over the last three months were developers, analysts, Microsoft, .Net and Windows. Other popular skills in the top 10 include SQL Server, Java, SQL, C# and Oracle.<\/p>\n Another UK survey, this time by Salary Services Limited and Computer Weekly, the top 10 skills in demand are SQL, C, Office, Java, SQL Server, C#, .Net, Oracle, C++ and Unix.<\/p>\n Keep your finger on the pulse<\/strong><\/p>\n In the IT field employees must ensure that they remain on top of their game, and today’s most sought after skills can be either oversubscribed or even outdated in a year or two.<\/p>\n Lifelong study and constant upgrading of knowledge and skills is paramount for long term employability – and although this is true for most fields it is doubly so for IT.<\/p>\n