Chicago, Boston Flaunt Largest IT Job Growth

The Chicago and Boston metro areas have shown the biggest gains in IT job postings since the beginning of 2006, according to the monthly report released July 11 from Dice.com, a career site for tech professionals.

Chicago and Boston have increased their number of tech jobs available 26.6 percent and 35.4 percent respectively since January, and 116 and 274 new jobs respectively since June.

Silicon Valley, in third place, continued to gain ground on Washington, D.C., which is in second place, with now fewer than 50 jobs posting separating the two IT hubs.

The Valley has been out of the top slot since October 2002 and out of the second since November 2003.

The New York-New Jersey region remained the area with the most available tech jobs for almost the fourth year running, increasing its gap between Washington, D.C., in the No. 2 spot, exponentially.

The cities had a difference of 2,807 jobs in June, up from a differential of just 76 jobs in January of this year.

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C++ and .Net continue to be the programming skills in the greatest demand, according to June 2006 job postings.

C++ requests have increased 47 percent since the beginning of the year, .Net 35 percent and Java up 24 percent since January.

The most requested positions on Dices job board for U.S. government jobs, ClearanceJobs.com, were for aerospace and aviation engineers, systems engineers, those with Java/J2EE software knowledge and software developers.

10 percent of topic poll respondents said that IT managers needed almost no in-the-trenches IT experience because “the technology doesnt matter; its about the people.”

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However, the majority (52 percent) said that IT managers needed about five years, allowing the individual to see about “everything change” by then.

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