Competing for IT Skills

Hiring federal IT workers could become slightly more competitive with the private sector in 2010, a new poll suggests. Dice.com recently surveyed private sector technology professionals and found that 49 percent are expecting their company's technology expenditures to rise at least slightly in 2010. When asked how they would allocate their company's IT budget, 26 percent of IT professionals said they would add staff, while 25 percent said they would give their IT workers a raise and 25 percent said they would invest in new projects or systems.

Dice.com also reported that Washington, D.C., New York City/New Jersey, and Silicon Valley remain the top cities for technology jobs. The most in-demand IT jobs this month were for operating systems (Windows, Unix), databases (Oracle, SQL) and programming languages (C, C++, C#, J2EE/Java).

Wired Workplace is a daily look at issues facing the federal information technology workforce. It is written by former Government Executive reporter Brittany Ballenstedt and published on Nextgov.com. Click here to read the latest entries.