Let's see. My favorite cliche of the day: This isn't your father's IT department. It moves a lot faster, for one thing, and the speed of change isn't something that CIOs can afford to keep out of their calculations as they make even short-term plans. A survey by CIO and the MIT Center for Information Systems Research found that CIOs "see some serious holes in the competencies of their IT groups and their companies generally," writes Kim S. Nash at CIO.com. And change comes so fast today , executives are feeling real pressure to stay on top of things lest they fall so far behind their company's are caught unprepared or can't catch up. That's lousy for a CIO's job security. All this is good news for people who've got the skills that can get a company ready for changes in both tech and user behavior. And the skills are application developers, business-IT experts, vendor managers, and people who are intimate with data and analytics. Know one of these and you could find yourself pulling down six figures.

The Details

Application Developers: They'll have to adapt IT to serve users who assume services like Twitter, Facebook and mobile services are standard modes of communication with more than their friends. Business-IT Experts: Actually, CIO calls them hybrids. They can move between functions, or understand how to put one in the context of another. Think about someone who can match, say, homeowner -friendly data analysis to their electric bill. Vendor Managers: The cloud, SaaS and all that. Someone has to manage all those outside services that companies are integrating into their IT operations. These folks have to negotiate and manage day-to-day relationships. Data Experts: IBM used to talk about Big Iron, now people are talking about Big Data. How do you organize all that unstructured data that's flowing around your company? I mean things like emails, videos, PowerPoints. And does the idea of an exabyte scare you? No? Then you'd probably be good at this job. It's always a good idea to know what management is worrying about, and you can bet plugging these holes are pretty high up on their list. And don't forget companies are paying a premium for people who can tackle one of these jobs. -- Mark Feffer