RHI study shows strong
demand for network professionals
Jul 18, 2001
Jason Hiner MCSE,
CCNA
© 2001 TechRepublic, Inc.
CIOs across the United States have declared their need for networking
professionals. In RHI Consulting’s
semiannual “Hot Jobs Report,” 24 percent of CIOs rated networking as the
hottest IT specialty in their corporate IT departments (see Figure A).
Internet/intranet development, which had overtaken networking in the last study,
fell back to second place with an 18 percent vote, and Help desk/end user
support came in third with a 15 percent vote.
These numbers certainly reflect the shifting priorities during this
consolidation period in the high-tech industry as well as the waning interest in
dot-com initiatives. As we’ll see, RHI Consulting has offered some further
insights into the meaning of these numbers.
A closer look at the data
“Factors fueling demand for those skilled in designing and managing internal
and external networks include an increasingly mobile workforce and an emphasis
on safeguarding corporate systems,” said Katherine Spencer Lee, RHI
Consulting’s executive director.
In other words, because network administrators are typically responsible for the
infrastructure supporting hot technologies such as WANs, distributed computing,
and network security, the current emphasis on these technologies is helping to
drive the demand for network professionals. The networking positions cited as
areas of greatest need by CIOs were network administrators, network architects,
and network analysts.
A specialty sometimes related to networking, database management, also saw a
healthy rise in demand from 9 percent in the last survey (the first one in which
the DBM category was included) to 12 percent in the current survey. “There is
growing demand for individuals accomplished in Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server
administration to translate the massive amounts of data collected by today’s
e-commerce applications into business intelligence that will aid decision-makers
throughout the company,” Lee said.
Overall, the results of the survey, conducted in the second quarter of 2000,
definitely show some fluctuations since the last survey taken six months ago and
earlier studies. Figure B compares the results of the last four RHI
surveys.
The study also took into account differences among the various regions of the
United States and among different industries (see Figure C). The West
South Central (31 percent) and Mid-Atlantic (29 percent) regions showed the
strongest demand for network professionals. In eight of the nine regions,
networking was the outright leader in demand among all IT specialties. In the
West North Central region, networking was tied with both Internet/intranet
development and help desk/end user support at 19 percent of the votes. Among the
industries, Transportation (29 percent) and professional services (27 percent)
exhibited the greatest need for net workers.
Logistics of the study
RHI Consulting, a services firm for placing IT professionals, created the
methodology for this scientific survey and commissioned an independent research
firm to carry it out. The survey polled a random sample of CIOs from U.S.
companies with at least 100 employees.
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