IT wages set to rise

If you're an IT professional, finally, there's some good news. A Meta Group report forecasts that IT salaries will rise 10-15% by 2007. General economic growth is behind the increase.

But whether you benefit depends on whether you have the skills in highest demand. Leading the way are training and experience in program management, application development, and networking. Internet skills and Java are also high on the list.

The demand for application development skills is particularly intriguing, seeing that conventional wisdom views those jobs as moving offshore.

The stats pertaining to application development are particularly surprising considering the number of those jobs that are being outsourced and offshored to save company's money. Outsourcing is picking up in practice and general acceptance and some of the first jobs to go are those in call centers and those in application development. Many analysts have been loudly warning workers that they need to acquire new skills if application development is all they have on their resumes.

[Maria] Schafer [of Meta Group] says not so.

"I think the outsourcing issue has gotten a huge amount of attention, but the reality is that it's a difficult thing to do and to do well," she says. "Clearly, outsourcing has begun to happen and it will increase over time. But fewer companies are doing that than most people believe or that the mass media would have you think."

Back in March I predicted that the trend to offshore software development would actually result in an increase in related jobs in the U.S.

Datamation has an article on the Meta study.

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