Windows 7: Microsoft: Thousands Of IT Jobs Going Unfilled

I' am a Senior Oracle Consultant and I struggle to fill vacancies. It's not the lack of candidates but we are always looking for people with specific skills / modules which makes it increasingly difficult to put excellent all-rounders in front of a client because as soon as they see the consultant profile they throw it back.

IT will always be an area with vacancies because the tech moves so fast, and it takes a special kind of person to commit to national / international travel, and even the holy grail of ' Working From Home ' really is only for the few.

Hi there
Some demands are still increasing hugely -- things like SAP - for instance -- but it's no good just being a "bog standard ABAP / JAVA etc coder" -- you need to keep up with new technologies such as Web access, B2B, B2C, C2B etc and then there is a huge market.

You also need to understand some of the business processes involved in the company you want to work for too -- there is not so much demand for 100% purely technical positions -- some but nothing like the number around if you can be a bit of a functional consultant too.

The daily rate for these types of jobs can be around 600 - 700 EUR / GBP a day for the right skill set - more if you have experience with some highly niche module too.

Note though in some areas IT can actually pay LOWER than it was paying 10 years ago !!! so you do need to acquire the right skill set.

In Belgium especially Brussels, Holland, Germany and Switzerland the market is still booming - in spite of the current problems with Wall St / US Politicians, European politicians / Bankers all not having a clue in what to do next to solve the trillions of dollars / euros of debt.

Cheers
jimbo

I have been out of the job market for several (many) years now so I don't really have a current understanding of the market place. However, it seemed to me that that phenomena was already occurring before I retired. The work force has been complacent and has not kept abreast of technological development. As a result, that US work force is ill prepared to compete on a global scale with those countries who have been training a technological work force. The movement to off shore manufacturing was inevitable. Moving it back will be nearly impossible.

On a very small scale, you can see why if you simply look at the curriculum of todays' high school students. Where has math and science gone? Where have the industrial arts gone?

I hope so as well. I am about 2-3 years off myself.