Certification Magazine - November 2007 - (Page 6)

DATA STREAM News & Notes for Certiﬁed Professionals Study Finds Change, Growth in IT Contractor Market Web-based staffing company HotGigs has released its 2007 IT Contract Workforce Report, which assesses the most in-demand skills among IT contract workers. The report is based on nearly 2 million searches for IT contract resources conducted on the HotGigs Staffing Exchange during the fourth quarter of 2006. It reveals employer demand for 30 key IT contract skills in IT labor markets throughout the United States. Drawing from 236,389 category searches, the No.1 IT contractor skill was enterprise resource planning (ERP) and packaged software. Doug Berg, HotGigs CEO and founder, said this was one of the report’s most noteworthy findings. that longer time frame. Project timelines and everything are moving much more quickly, and people are breaking projects up into much smaller pieces.” To some extent, whether an IT contractor skill is hot depends on companies’ levels of comfort in farming out that need to a contractor, and project management’s high ranking as an IT contractor skill indicates companies are comfortable handing this role to an outsider. “People bring in project managers, frankly, because the project either went off course, or the politics of the project get in the way of someone being faithful to making sure the project gets done on time and on budget,” Berg said. “They end up parachuting someone in who will be the person who’s loyal to the project itself and less concerned with who gets to work on it and when they get to work on it.” The same level of comfort does not seem to be present regarding security. Although it’s the hottest issue in IT, the report found security ranked 19th among IT contractor skills, with just 31,786 category searches. “There’s always been a demand for development and database — the grinders, as I call it — but it was significant to see that there was that much demand for integration and ERP package software kind of folks, which is SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, etc.,” Berg said. “It is somewhat surprising to see how quickly these new technologies are adopted. That’s what makes it so hard for companies — you can’t say, ‘I need a person with 10 years of experience who’s an expert’ because, in this case, your years of experience have nothing to do with how well you know something. That’s where certifications can really play a strong role because people can learn things so much more quickly now.” To some extent, whether an IT contractor skill is hot depends on companies’ levels of comfort in farming out that need to a contractor. “The problem is most companies don’t want to hire an outside contractor to do their security,” Berg said. “They want to hire an internal expert who’s going to not only put best practices in place but do it in a way that the outside world doesn’t know what’s going on.” He also said, however, that security is gaining traction among IT contractor skill sets. “In the report last year, it was in the mid- to high 20s,” Berg said. 10-GbE-Certiﬁed IP Storage Program Introduced IP storage company Intransa has launched a certification program to allow software and hardware vendors to test and certify applications with scalable, enterprise 10-gigabit Ethernet (GbE) storage solutions. In entering the Intransa StorAlliance10 GbE Certified IP Storage Program, vendors perform testing in the company’s StorAlliance Certification Lab in San Jose, Calif. Testing includes network, storage and Another significant finding was strong demand for project management IT contractor skills, which came in third, with 177,818 category searches. Berg said he was surprised by this, as well. “I’ve just seen so much moaning and groaning in the marketplace, and a lot of the projects also are not multiyear projects like they used to be back in the ’90s,” he said. “We’re looking at the average project timeline being between three and six months, which is good and bad because it breaks the projects up a lot, gives people a lot of options, but it also means that you can’t sit back on a multiyear project and assume that you’re going to have a billable engagement for 6 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE November 2007

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Certification Magazine - November 2007

Certification Magazine - November 2007 Contents Editor's Letter Data Stream Tech Careers Academic Connection Dear Techie Virtual Village Certification Outside Technology Inside Certification The Webmaster: Online Everyman Interface Time Tips: How to Fit Certification into Your Schedule Ad Index Endtag

Certification Magazine - November 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.