- Programming and application development — 60 percent
- Project management — 40 percent
- Help desk/technical support — 35 percent
- Security — 7 percent
- Business intelligence/analytics — 26 percent
- Cloud/SaaS — 25 percent
- Virtualization -- 24 percent
- Networking -- 19 percent
- Mobile Applications and Device Management -- 19 percent
- Data Center -- 16 percent
Best Opportunities May be at the Top 10 List's Bottom
Just when we’ve finished digesting the latest “Hottest Skills for IT” list comes another “Hottest Skills for IT” list, followed by another, then the next and the next and the next. There’s nothing wrong with such information, and it’s a perfectly reasonable exercise for recruiters, consulting firms and the trade press to take the temperature of the tech workforce and sniff out trends. Lately, however, the conventional wisdom behind these lists has me skipping past the top five and focusing down at the bottom, where things are often more interesting. Here, for example, are next year's hottest skills for IT, according to Computerworld. Each is followed by the percentage of IT execs who plan to hire for each in the next 12 months: