UK / Cloud skills best for career advancement

Reflecting the exploding growth of cloud computing in the United States and Europe, the most in-demand skills in the U.K. IT workforce are now cloud computing skills, according to a recent workforce study by Robert Half Technology.

Robert Half surveyed Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and IT directors in the U.K. on those skills they considered to be of the greatest value in the career development of IT professionals. The study results were released two weeks ago, and find that cloud computing skills are now viewed as the most valuable for IT professionals to have or to obtain.

CIOs ranked top skills as:

• Cloud computing (39%)
• IT security (37%)
• Project management (33%)
• Virtualization (29%)
• Network administration and engineering (27%)
• Mobile and application development (27%)
• Database management (24%)
• C# development (15%)
• Business intelligence (14%)
• Java development (13%)

The demand for cloud skills comes as no surprise, considering the rate of adoption of cloud computing by organisations this year. Several recent studies have confirmed that a majority of organisations now have some degree of presence in private clouds, public clouds, or both.

The Robert Half survey revealed that 41% of CIOs responded that they plan to hire additional staff due to cloud computing demands this year and next.

According to an article in Computer Weekly: “About 1.7 million cloud computing-related job roles globally could not be filled in 2012 because applicants lacked the training, certification and experience needed to work in a cloud-enabled world.”