1.2. 10 It job roles that are hardest to fill

By Justin James, http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-it-job-roles-that-are-hardest-to-fill/3160

The IT job market is usually a seller’s market, even in tough times like these. But some IT roles are especially difficult to fill. Here are 10 jobs that typically send companies into fits when they need to hire for them.

1: It trainer

IT trainers play a unique role in the IT world, and they need a unique skill set. By itself, this position would be hard enough to fill. But add the fact that being a trainer differs in many ways from the typical IT job, along with the frequent need for travel, and you have a recipe for “tough hire.”

2: Project manager

The biggest problem in hiring project managers is usually self-imposed: the “requirement” of a PMP certification. Why does that make it hard to hire? It isn’t just that folks with PMP certification are expensive and tough to find. It’s the difficulty of obtaining the certification in the first place. The certification has a “chicken and egg” logic to it: To earn it, you need to be managing projects… but it can be hard to get project management work without the cert. As a result, the talent pool is artificially small, and many otherwise well-qualified candidates get filtered out.

3: Cio/cto/director of it/etc.

IT leadership roles are extremely difficult to fill. Like IT trainers, leadership positions require the candidates to have skills that just are not learned in the typical IT job. Companies are forced to hire good leaders with weak (or nonexistent) technical knowledge or to hope that a technical person can learn the leadership and business skills required to be a success. It is difficult to find someone who has good “crossover” skills and whom you feel comfortable with, making leadership positions hard to fill.

4: Help desk staff

The basic problem with filling help desk jobs is that they usually pay far less than the person you really want to hire will accept. Plenty of people can do a perfectly fine job with the help desk position, despite the technical skills required and its challenges for workers (the stress of metrics they have little control over, like “average time to answer calls” and ticket closure rates, dealing with angry people over a phone, etc.). But how many of them are actually going to work for what the help desk job pays?

Most companies see the help desk as a necessary evil, a cost center to be contained. And in a way, they are right. With razor thin margins in many industries, the cost of support can make or break the profitability of a company. So it is natural for them to squeeze the salaries as hard as they can. But for managers looking for well-qualified workers, those tight budgets make it impossible to get the right help, unless they find a diamond in the rough or someone with a tough job situation.

5: Specialized programmer

Device drivers, operating systems, and mobile applications: Any idea what they have in common? The developers who know how to write those kinds of software and do a good job of it are exceedingly rare — or there is a high demand for a relatively small number of developers. Some of these positions are just so specialized that only a handful of developers are doing it. Others (like mobile applications) have lots of developers out there, but the demand is just so high that the companies looking to make a hire have positions unfilled for months at a time.

6: Pre-sales engineer

Pre-sales engineer is another IT-related job that requires a diverse range of talents beyond the technical. To make it an even harder position to fill, it is a job that requires a lot of travel. Simply put, nothing can substitute for the hands-on demonstration when it comes to closing a deal. And on top of that, the job is almost pure customer service, often in person, which many IT people do not want to deal with, especially considering that they have other job options. A pre-sales engineer needs the heart of a salesperson wrapped in the mind of an IT pro, and that’s a tricky mix to find.