Survey Says CIOs to Boost Hiring in the Third Quarter

Published: June 29, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are an MIS manager, you better start thinking about how much of your IT budget you want to dedicate to those new servers and how much you want to squirrel away so you can put a little extra into the paychecks of the employees you want to retain.

According to a forecast by Robert Half Technology, which monitors hiring and firing in the information technology sector, chief information officers and MIS managers are expecting a "modest uptick" in hiring in the third quarter, which begins next week. RTI has been monitoring IT hiring on a quarterly basis since 1995, and its latest forecast is based on surveys of over 1,400 CIOs and MIS managers at a random sample of companies in the United States with more than 100 total employees.

About 13 percent of the IT executives polled said they planned to add staff in the third quarter, compared to 3 percent who anticipated making cuts in their staff. About 44 percent of the executives who planned to hire full-time IT employees in the quarter said that the main reason they were doing so was because their businesses were expanding and they needed to add or change their applications. About 23 percent of those hiring said that they were adding people because they wanted to improve customer and end user support.

When all 1,400 of the IT execs were asked about the skills that they needed--whether or not they could afford to hire anyone--a whopping 79 percent said they really needed to add Microsoft Windows server administrators, with network administrators, who wrestle with network gear and usually Unix or Linux systems, being in short supply at 76 percent of those polled. Database administrators were cited by 69 percent of the CIOs and MIS managers as being needed. (The executives were allowed multiple responses across the categories.) The financial, insurance, and real estate industries are the hot ones when it comes to IT hiring, and apparently the mountain states are the hot geographic area, with 19 percent of CIOs saying they plan to hire in the quarter. Go west, young man. Or, east if you are in San Francisco or Seattle.

"Continued corporate expansion is prompting many CIOs to initiate new projects and expand hiring plans," explained Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology, in a statement accompanying the IT hiring forecast. "As a result, competition for the most skilled candidates is increasing as hiring managers seek individuals who can support internal staff and assist with new development initiatives. As the employment market becomes more competitive, technology executives will need to focus their efforts on sound retention strategies."