IT Leaders Weigh In on Spending, Hiring, Growing Markets

by Nathan Eddy

In the first half of 2014, business intelligence/big data, security, mobility and cloud computing were among the top five initiatives with the biggest impacts on organizations. Mobility has been the top impact area for three straight quarters, and security was the second most impactful area for all three quarters.

In late 2013, 47 percent of IT leaders expected increases in full-time hiring this year. By the end of September, 37 percent of IT leaders reported an increase in full-time hiring—compared with 35 percent in March and 31 in June of this year.

In the first nine months of this year, developers and architects placed consistently in the top five most difficult positions to fill with exceptional talent. Programming, application development and architect positions have also been in the top five. On the flip side, help desk and technical support, cloud and social media have consistently been the least difficult roles to fill with top talent.

The positions that fluctuated the most in terms of difficulty of finding top talent were software engineers, project managers, and business intelligence and big data specialists. IT leaders found that project managers have also seen a steady increase in difficulty of hiring.

The skills gaining importance in the future will most likely include those that evolve from the hottest trends in IT today—big data and business intelligence, mobile, security and cloud computing, TEKsystems Research Manager Jason Hayman told eWEEK. Some of the skills within these impact areas that will continue to gain traction include user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) developers and designers, data modelers, ethical hackers and project managers.

Whether organizations are improving the end-user experience on a mobile device, or making enterprise applications more user-friendly for non-tech types, workers with UI/UX skills will be critical, Hayman said, while data modelers are critical for turning seemingly random data sets into usable, predictive information that can be leveraged to make real-time decisions.

With security breaches a constant threat to almost all organizations, ethical hacking will be a necessary skill as organizations continue to test and safeguard their systems, Hayman explained. For project managers, technology’s lightning-fast rate of change means IT projects and initiatives never cease. “Organizations will continue to need IT project managers that can shepherd their projects effectively,” he said. “As trends like DevOps and Agile [development] continue to expand, organizations will need to tap into PM talent capable of driving large initiatives.”

Throughout this year, the percentage of IT leaders who saw increases in hiring of temporary workers has increased, from 35 percent at the end of March, 37 percent at the end of June and 42 percent at the end of September.

However, a large percentage of respondents reported that temporary hiring remained flat from 2013—more than half in each of this year’s first three quarters (54 percent at both the end of March and end of June, and 50 percent at the end of September).

Over the course of the year, there has been a slight decline in those who expressed confidence and those who were neutral, and an increase of 7 percent in those who were not confident. The report concluded that in addition to never receiving increased budgets to complete workloads, this dip in confidence could be attributed to the realization that time is running out to complete planned projects or that additional IT projects have been scheduled for the remainder of the year.