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<\/a>Driving the enterprise this year is a quest for efficiency and flexibility. To determine the actual direction, one needs quantifiable information that proves certain trends have merit.<\/p>\nThe want ads are a great resource for seeing what types of investments are being made by companies. This year, people with virtualization skills are in big demand, followed by -you guessed it – cloud computing.<\/p>\n
Sponsor<\/em> Forrester Research<\/a> is predicting that IT spending will jump about 8% but hiring will lag.<\/p>\n According to a post on CIO.com<\/a>, Wedbush Securities, a Wall Street analyst firm, sees projects involving virtualization, Windows 7 and enterprise software as high on the corporate priority list.<\/p>\n In 2008, Dice.com<\/a> ran an average of 85,000 job listings. Then Lehman Bros. collapsed and the job market fizzled. Jobs posted took a drop in 2009, falling to a low of 47,000. Today, the count is up to 50,000 and is expected to increase over the span of the year.<\/p>\n The fastest growing skills are for virtualization, which is at about 2,000 ads, up 21% compared to last year. Cloud computing is showing popularity, too. Last year there were zero jobs posted.This year there are more than 300.<\/p>\n Large companies from a number of industries are hiring virtualization pros, showing the demand is not just from technology companies.<\/p>\n IT managers realize that virtualization pros can manage more servers than their counterparts. For example, CIO.com cites a study that found one administrator manages 65 physical servers. The average for virtual servers is 77. <\/p>\n That’s not a huge increase but it can help save IT dollars that can be used to prove whether other growing trends deserve attention.<\/p>\n Discuss<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n