According to Foote’s survey, tech jobs in the last quarter of 2011were not willing to pay as much as they used to for certified skills which included Oracle/Siebel 7.7 certified consultant, Microsoft certified database administrator, and IBM certified specialist in storage networking solutions. These courses lost around 15 percent (or more) of their market value while narrow non-certified skills sets, including SAP Business One, SAP Web application server, and ColdFusion/ColdFusion MX, saw a similar spiraling decline.

Certified skills that did increase in value by a rough 15 percent comprised of broader skill-sets such as EC-Council certified security analyst, certified wireless network administrator, CompTIA Server+, and HP accredited platform specialist. The same amount of value was gained by other non-certified skills including application development, and development frameworks Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Joomla, VbScript, Drupal, and Ruby – which are notably used in the popular areas of cloud, mobile, messaging-oriented frameworks, e-commerce and Web applications.

“The broader trend continues to be employers hiring hybrid IT-business professionals with combinations of both business and technology knowledge, experience, and skill sets, unlike those found in traditional IT organizations. ...Clearly there is demand for a mix of specific technical skills along with business and communications skills,” explains Foote. Bill Reynolds, a partner at Foote agrees with him, noting that a number of firms whose lines of business were not related to technology directly have openings that need tech-savvy employees with different skills.

One thing to be kept in mind though is that the IT jobs are evolving like the other areas of the labor market, and that tech job-seekers must stay updated.