Some positive news for technologists looking to work in the financial sector: The passage of the Dodd-Frank Act (aka "The financial reform bill") is a creating a variety of openings on Wall Street. Financial firms are ramping up recruitment for programmers, database administrators, and operating system specialists. Programmers are in particular demand, with firms looking to hire experts in C, C++, C#, Java J2EE and Perl. Additionally, Wall Street needs specialists in risk analytics, or the building of intelligence around risk.

Unlike techs working in other industries - who may get by without understand the business for which they work, or a fundamental understanding of business at all - those working in finance must have a background in business. Wall Street produces mountains of data and needs specialists who understand it. "We have a lot of clients on Wall Street who are looking for technologists who can handle the speed, quantity and precision of that information," says Constance Melrose, managing director of eFinancialCareers North America (our sister site).  These skills are transferable, however. "Assessing the probability of risk in one scenario can probably be applied to another scenario," she says.

As the economy climbs out of the recession, the financial sector seeks to hire techs with other skills as well. A survey of 240 IT professionals and business manages taken in early June shows strong interest in both cloud and mobile technologies, which today aren't necessarily mutually exclusive with the onset of tablets like the iPad. 

"There's a bigger appetite for new technologies than we've seen the past," observes Suzanne Duncan, an analyst for IBM's Institute of Business Value.

-- Dino Londis