Wanted: Skilled workers -- but only those with the right skills need apply

As the US economy has tightened, so have IT job prospects. But there are still some hiring bright spots.

"A lot of times, people put us only in the retail category, and that is not correct," Krueger said, pointing to newer offerings such as Amazon's cloud computing and online storage services. "They don't get that we're a technology employer."

Greg Whalin, chief technology officer at Meetup, which operates a Web site for people who want to organize groups around shared interests in their local communities, said that as far as he's concerned, the economy isn't having any affect on IT hiring. "From what I hear on the street, most companies in our sector are aggressively hiring," he said. "It's difficult to find candidates."

Meetup, which currently employs about 50 people, has five open positions and is seeking another 10 to 15 workers to fill job openings that it expects to post in the near future. The US-based company is looking to add Java developers and front-end Web designers, as well as project managers, systems administrators and quality assurance engineers. "We're kind of across the board," Whalin said. "Whatever you need to build and run Web sites, we're hiring for."

White Oak Technologies, a vendor of tools for searching large databases, has been having such a hard time finding qualified workers to fill open positions that it distributed a flyer at the O'Reilly conference offering a US$2,500 bounty to people who help it find worthy job candidates. According to the handout, company is seeking application, Web client and systems developers as well as a Linux and Unix systems administrator for its data center.

In July, online job placement firm Jobfox included six IT job categories on a list of its "top 20 most recession-proof professions." The favored IT disciplines included software design and development, networking and systems administration, software implementation analysis, testing and quality assurance, database administration and senior IT management -- especially for executives with mobile and Web 2.0 experience.

"We know our recruiters are dying to get people with those skills," said Jobfox spokesman Barry Lawrence. "Everybody is trying to improve the ways they do business, to streamline in a tough economy."

Nina Buik, president of Connect, an independent Hewlett-Packard user group with about 50,000 members, agreed that the economic downturn is having varying effects on different types of IT workers. For example, Buik sees a big need for workers with skills in virtualization, blade servers, security and storage. "Those are very marketable skills in today's IT market," she said.

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