IT job hiring is picking up in the healthcare and financial services industries, due to regulatory compliance and the explosion of data, according to management consulting firm Janco Associates. It also expects healthy IT hiring in life sciences, telecom, transportation, infrastructure and energy. The most in-demand skills according to the report are: virtualization; business intelligence; app development, especially for mobile devices; .Net; Java; PHP; Silverlight and SharePoint. Sales application engineers, CRM specialists, security experts, backup and recovery technicians, service/help desk support specialists, service technicians and specialists who can link social media to enterprise IT ecosystems or the Web are also in demand. Small companies also are looking for IT pros who are generalists – an IT person who can program, do systems administration and deal with customers, for example. Meanwhile, tech executives polled for the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report projected a net three percent increase in IT hiring for the second quarter. That compares with a net 10 percent increase reported for the first quarter, a time when many new budgets go into effect. Eighty-five percent of those surveyed planned no change in hiring, which is an increase of 15 percentage points from the first quarter. CIOs in the mountain region – Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming – were most likely to increase IT hiring, projecting a net 12 percent increase. Network administration is the skill set in the greatest demand, followed by database management and desktop support. Robert Half expects the most IT hiring to be in the wholesale industry, followed by transportation and manufacturing. Meanwhile, a survey by Boca Raton, Fla.-based IT staffing firm PROTECH, found that 2012 IT budgets in south Florida are up 10.2 percent this year. A second survey found that 42 percent of tech bosses in the region plan to add staff this year, up 13 percentage points from last year.