IT job seekers: Get cracking now

The United States may or may not default on its debts. But either way, nobody serious expects a strong economic recovery for the foreseeable future. That’s why now may be the best time to find an IT job: Some companies are still hiring to make up for freezes imposed during the miserable depths of the recession. After that, who knows?

So as they say on TV, act now. As we reported in Robert Strohmeyer’s feature last month, “The 6 hottest new jobs in IT,” the slew of new IT jobs added over the past year has been impressive. Then, in early July, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that overall stats for June were pretty miserable. One month of bad numbers doesn’t equal a double dip. But whether you’re on the fence about jumping to a better job or still trying to escape the ranks of the unemployed, now is the time to get moving before a window of opportunity closes.

Following the herd

Where to look? The IT job market probably shifts faster than any other, so you have to keep up with the trends. Some of them, like the rise of cloud computing and mobile technology, couldn’t be more obvious. But how do they translate to jobs?

As I noted last week, I think developers will be the big winners of the cloud era because shorter development, test, and deployment cycles mean better apps and more opportunities. But that also goes for mobile, with Objective-C skills for the iPhone and Java skills for Android or BlackBerry in high demand. And of course, the need for those will HTML5 skills has also increased.

As InfoWorld’s Neil McAllister recently observed in his Fatal Exception blog, HTML5 has been way overhyped as an app dev panacea. But you can’t ignore that the hype has yielded extraordinarily high demand. The job site Indeed.com names HTML5 as its top trend and offers this hockey stick showing the increase in the number of job postings with “HTML5” in them.

Elsewhere on the Indeed.com site, you’ll find similarly dramatic rises in jobs mentioning mobile apps, Android, and jQuery. Interestingly, those mentioning iPhone have slipped a little in recent months, although iPhone remains the No. 8 trend featured by the site.

Check out the Simply Hired jobs site, and you’ll find a nice chart tracking the percentages of jobs postings that mention Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby from November 2009 through May 2011. While Perl remains on top, PHP and Ruby jobs have grown most sharply, with increases of over 50 percent.

As for where not to look, I think there’s little doubt that as we enter the cloud computing era, old-fashioned sys and network admin jobs will decline — and the ones that remain will require new, more sophisticated skills. After all, a big part of the whole cloud idea amounts to “increasing efficiency,” which means replacing human maintenance of the data center with automation.

On the other hand, companies that try to save money by outsourcing to public cloud services may discover the whole endeavor a little harder than they bargained for. As InfoWorld’s Matt Prigge observed recently, customers that turn to, say, Amazon Web Services often discover they need people who have experience in those environments to make everything run correctly. So add “cloud specialist” to your list of hot jobs — or, further up the food chain, “cloud architect.”

Please note, job seekers, that I’m making no attempt whatsoever to be comprehensive. Head on over to “The 6 hottest new jobs in IT” and “IT jobs: Winners and losers in the cloud era” for more info.

The same old advice applies

The top three pieces of job hunting advice never change: network, network, network. Talk to people associated by whatever degree to a company you want to work for. Ping far-flung, well-connected people to let them know you’re in the market just in case they may hear of something in your line of work. Go to networking events or meet-ups on a regular basis, no matter how tedious they may seem. Come on, do I need to tell you to work Facebook and LinkedIn? I didn’t think so.

Personally, the best trick I know to increase your chances in a job interview is to go to school on your prospective employer. If you’re fluent in the company’s financial performance, latest product offerings, executive moves, recent acquisitions, and so on — and you can find places in the conversation to interject that information without sounding like a know-it-all — you can knock ’em dead. Even better if you can assemble a bio on the person who’s interviewing you (yet another practical use of social networking).

All this is pretty basic stuff, especially if you’re seeking a higher-level position. Another smart thing to do is use the above-mentioned research (and the job description itself) to create custom versions of your resume for each prospective employer. This isn’t about stretching the truth; it’s about creating marketing collateral to sell you to a specific audience. This requires some writing skill, so if you lack that, find someone to help you out.

Ultimately, there are all kinds of reasons to take heart. Year after year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics cites information technology as one of the highest growth areas. And why not? If you work in tech, you’re actually doing something useful rather than, say, niggling the fine points of tax law or cooking up elaborate derivative gambling schemes. Congratulate yourself on choosing a career in technology. And then get cracking.

This article, “IT job seekers: Get cracking now,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog, and for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.