Hot Career Skills: IT Profession 2010 Special Report

According to a special Gartner report on the IT profession, in 2010, e-commerce and information technology departments will be populated with "versatilists"—those with a technology background who also know the business sector, can design and carry out IT plans that add business value, and who can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.

The skills required to land these future technical roles can be honed outside of information technology. Some of these skills will come from artistic talents, math excellence or public speaking. Expertise in areas such as financial engineering, technology and mathematics will come together to form the next round of imaginative tools and technologies. Google, eBay and Yahoo are already hiring math, financial analysis, engineering and technology gurus who will devise imaginative algorithms to fulfill users' online needs. And the National Academy of Sciences has identified a budding area of expertise that combines technology capabilities with artistic and creative skills, such as those found in computer gaming.

By 2010, six out of 10 people affiliated with information technology will assume business-facing roles, according to Gartner. The following areas are likely to be hot:

• Customer-facing Web application systems
• Artificial intelligence
• Data mining
• Data warehousing
• Business intelligence
• Enterprise architecture
• Project leadership
• Business process re-engineering
• Project planning, budgeting and scheduling
• IT security planning and management

A Gartner survey found the following expectations about the most growth in jobs in the next five years:

1. Web services
2. Wireless/mobile
3. Business intelligence
4. Service-oriented architecture
5. Identity management
6. Disaster recovery/continuity planning
7. Data management/business analytics
8. E-business
9. RFID
10. Anti-virus protection