Fourteen percent of chief information officers plan to add staff to their IT departments in the second quarter, according to the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Forecast and Local Trend Report released today. That compares to 8 percent who said they planned their IT staff in the survey for the second quarter of last year. However, it’s down from the 17 percent who planned to add staff in the first quarter of this year.

“We continue to see strong demand for IT workers as companies increase their investment in technology initiatives, including security, data mining and mobile,” said John Reed, senior executive director of Robert Half Technology. “Companies are finding it most challenging to recruit technology professionals in specialties such as network administration and database management.”

The Q2 IT hiring forecast found:

• CIOs adding more staff to IT departments: 14 percent
• CIOs planning to hire only for open IT roles: 61 percent
• CIOs planning to put IT hiring plans on hold: 22 percent
• CIOs planning to reduce their IT staff: 2 percent

Seventy percent of CIOs surveyed said it's somewhat or very challenging to find skilled IT professionals today. Respondents cited networking, data/database management and applications development as the most challenging functional areas in which to recruit.

Among the technology executives surveyed, 51 percent said both network administration and database management are the skill sets in greatest demand within their IT department. Desktop support followed, with 48 percent of the response.

The survey is based on more than 2,300 telephone interviews with CIOs from a random sample of U.S. companies in 23 major metro areas with 100 or more employees.