Amazon posted more ads for IT jobs -- 16,146 in all -- than anyone during 2013, according to CompTIA's annual IT Industry Outlook report. The report’s based on numbers from Burning Glass Technologies in Boston, which analyzes online job postings from approximately 32,000 jobs sites. It eliminates duplicates, then runs analytics to mine the particular skills employers are seeking. Rounding out the top 10 were:

• Accenture, 14,240 job ads
• Deloitte, 13,077
• Microsoft, 12,435
• Best Buy, 10,725
• IBM, 10,221
• General Dynamics, 9,705
• Science Applications International Corp., 7,146
• Lockheed Martin, 6,995
• HP, 6,923.

Amazon, whose overall headcount reached nearly 110,000 in October, has been hiring hundreds of engineers in Herndon, Va., after winning a $600 million contract to build a secure, super-secret cloud platform for the Central Intelligence Agency. It’s also been building up a development hub in Vancouver, B.C. Susan Harker, Amazon vice president of global talent acquisition, recently spoke to Dice News about what the company looks for in IT candidates. Best Buy's hiring represents the growing importance of "middle skill" IT jobs, meaning  those that don’t necessarily require a bachelor’s degree, according to Burning Glass, which saw about 200,000 of those types of positions in its analysis. Those are the kind of jobs you might find at support organizations like Geek Squad. Think help desk.