Top ten IT skills

The top ten IT skills to have for the next few years

This is not a scientific survey, but merely the opinions of a few agents that we asked. If you have a highly valued skill that isn't on here, don't worry, this is not definitive, but merely the opinions of a few agents. I'm sure if we'd polled others the list might have been slightly different.

Skills on the Up

We polled a number of agents and other sources of information and came up with the following skills that are likely to be on the up over the next few years. Anyone with these skills is likely to be employed, at good rates, even taking into account offshore outsourcing and Fast Track Visa Workers.

1. J2EE
2. .Net
3. C#
4. Project Management
5. Oracle 8 and 9i
6. SAP
7. Business Analysis
8. VB.net
9. NT Novell
10. Java

New Hot Skills

The top three are definitely becoming very hot skills.

It's good to see Project Management up there. It is a much underrated skill.

Business Analysts are also less immune to offshore outsourcing, as they have to remain reasonably close to the business users.

SAP continues to do well and is taking market share from its rivals.

Siebel also gained an honourable mention.

Oracle continues to be very strong, and is also expected to gain even more market share in the coming years.

Honourable Mentions

Other skills that also received honourable mention for the future are some of those from before the downturn such as:-

SQL
Unix
C++
VB
Access
ASP

In fact SQL, Unix and C++ are still the most sought after skills currently, and anyone who has them should stand in good stead.

Those where you might find it a bit of a struggle in the next few years are the skills from before the previous downturn like Cobol, CICS, DB2 etc.

There is still quite a lively market for PL/I though.

As I said at the start, this is not a definitive list, but we thought it would be worthwhile to pass on what agents believe to be the skills that they think they will be looking for more and more in the next few years.