As I said, my yahoo inbox is filled every week with emails from recruiters begging me to take some IT job that they are having a hard time filling. Because I've always worked in the Midwest (MO, KS, MN a few, Chicagoland many) it's natural that I get a lot from this area.
Michigan had many up thru 2007. In 2008-08 it disappeared. But in late 2009 and now in 2010 it is coming back. Recruiters say they can't find anyone who wants to work in Michigan. (That includes me, of course.)
In addition there seem to be many IT openings DC to FL up through TN, AK, TX on the way to AZ.
I've never understood why, regardless of the economy, I never see jobs from Baltimore to PA,NY,MA nor CA,OR,WA.
The job market is like musical chairs. Over 10% of a typical IT shop hop for a better job every year. (Seemed like more than 10% in my shop last year.) That leaves jobs open for others. When they hop their old jobs become open.
Here in IL one IT shop announced that it was laying off 123 IT workers. Immediately two other IT shops said they would hire every single one of them that was willing to come over.
Job hopping for a better spot seems to account for many more empty chairs in the game than the addition or subtraction of chairs by boom and bust.
I'm not sure how much technology trends have to do with it. COBOL/DB2/SQL are my skill and always in high demand. Java, networking and column based databases seem to be in high demand. VB/.net/MS skills have low demand and by the law of supply and demand, probably don't pay as well.
You'd think people in IT would think logically. But in fact IT is very much driven by fads that defy logic. It seems that every month there is a new trend du jour, only to be replaced the next month by the newest hype from the marketing departments.
I think we can all expect that there will be a massive need for IT workers in the shops that need to keep up with the massive number of changes that we can expect will come out of the hundreds of new government regulatory agencies, commissions, committees, boards, etc. As my daughter said, she thinks Obamacare is bad for the US. But it is great for her short term employment prospects.
I do have to admit COBOL is always in high demand. And that accounts for about 1 in 10,000 IT people. CS departments presumed years ago — before Y2K — that COBOL would go extinct, and quit training anyone for it. It’s kinda like saying that there’s a shortage of animal husbandry workers because you can’t find a good, experienced condor breeder.
Yeah, it was kinda dumb to presume it’d go extinct. But it’s meaninglessly insignificant in the issue of labor shortages.