You can’t drop the ball on your recruitment and retention efforts. You have to work hard to keep the employees you have, and that often costs your company more money as well as stock options. Still, the demand for IT workers keeps growing, and IT employees continue to increase their skill sets.
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The impact of the IT worker shortage has meant IT managers are paying higher wages and bigger bonuses to keep their employees happy (See chart 1). One way to keep employees happy is to share the wealth through stock options. However, according to Interactive Week , only 20 percent of companies give all their employees the same number of stock options; most base it on the employee’s position in the company. It’s estimated that 58.9 percent of employees received stock options in 1999, and 53.6 percent in 1998, according to Interactive Week (see chart 2).

When surveyed by Best Jobs U.S.A . about their skill sets, 1,780 IT workers indicated that Microsoft training predominates (see chart 3). Just over 30 percent of IT workers are trained in UNIX, and only about 16% are trained in Oracle database management. About 35 percent know HTML, and about 15 percent know Java programming.

According to interviews conducted with CIOs by Robert Half International , a headhunter firm, the IT jobs most in demand are networking jobs (22 percent), end-user support (16 percent), and Web site development (15 percent) (see chart 4). The demand for networking is the greatest area of growth, especially on the East and West Coasts.

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