IT Staffing Report: Sept. 10, 2015

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Which IT Skills are in Highest Demand?

As most anyone involved in recruiting tech talent in recent years would attest, the strengthening global economic recovery has made it increasingly difficult to find workers. This condition is not evenly distributed among IT roles, however, with the supply/demand imbalance felt much more acutely in certain skillsets for which enterprise needs are growing rapidly. A new report based on the results of our 2015 Global Contingent Buyers Survey takes a closer look at the exact skills that are in greatest demand. Companies with 1,000 or more employees were asked to provide their open-ended responses to the question, “What specific skills are you having the greatest challenge recruiting?”

Among buyers that indicated the greatest share of their contingent workforce spend was on workers with IT skills, the skill most cited as difficult to recruit was data/data science, including specific roles such as data scientist, data specialist and data architect. While the concept of “big data” has been around for a while, enterprises across a broadening range of industries are becoming more cognizant of the need to strategically leverage the tremendous volumes of information they generate. Meanwhile, the Internet of Things — many of which are inside our homes or on our person — has created new streams of data to be captured, curated and analyzed.

Second on the list was information security, which had twice the number of mentions it received in 2014. Despite the number of high-profile private and public sector data security breaches over the last few years, our checks indicated that this had not been a major source of demand for staffing suppliers. Rather, the bulk of business in this area had been going to IT consulting firms and systems integrators, as most organizations remained in the conceptual stage with regard to their information security policies and systems. The increase in recruiting focus in 2015 suggests that we may have reached something of an inflection point in the transition from planning to implementation.

Java-related skills, including specific roles like developer and architect, ranked in the top three most difficult-to-recruit IT skills, as it has for the prior two years we have queried buyers on recruiting difficulty. Also making the list for the third year in a row was project management. As the enterprise IT market continues to shift towards broader use of the consulting/managed services model, the project manager’s role is taking on increased prominence.

In addition to ranking the most oft-mentioned skill areas, the report includes an appendix that provides the raw, open-ended survey responses, many of which cite specific programming languages or software platforms. Corporate Members can access the report here.