Donohue's Article Review: The Hottest Skills for 2007 Part 2

According to Computerworld’s latest quarterly Vital Signs survey of IT trends, programming acumen, project management experience, IT-business analysis know-how, security savvy and technical support skills are the skills in which will help ensure an employee is well-rounded. This answers questions as to what companies are looking for in their applicants. Employers desire employees who can use these skills to help benefit the entire company, and are able to be successful team players. The most attractive employee a company can have will be the one who can bring the most value to that company, in both finances and technology. It takes a lot of technical knowledge to engineer and design automated computer systems, but the ability to appeal to the customer or coworkers is another story. Even tasks involved within the systems development life cycle need to have a business mentality. This will allow IT professional to think outside the box on how their job can benefit the company as a whole. Employees should be able to have the ability to construct ideas, and then be able to physically carry out those ideas, even though the job description may not require them to. What this means is that even those applicants that are applying for managerial positions will be most beneficial knowing the technical nature of the processes being managed. For those who will be laboring, recognizing the firms overall goals and their role in the big picture. This sense of vision is an essential trait to have, and can relate to the Chief Information Officer’s vision of how technology is changing and how to best respond to these changes.