America's 10 Most Wanted

Computerworld - Patrick Matus has 10 phone numbers that he always keeps at his fingertips. These are for the staffing firms he uses to help find talent for the 900-plus-employee IT department at Freddie Mac in McLean, Va.
Some of those recruiters get him the generalists he needs. Others have expertise in finding IT professionals with certain specialties that Matus frequently needs. If you do the hiring for a large IT department, you need an army of help these days.
Today, Matus has his army out looking for several types of workers: network engineers to help put together and maintain his new Cisco routers; data security analysts to implement and test network security measures; Unix system administrators to fill vacancies from normal turnover; developers to move legacy systems onto the Web; and Sybase administrators, because his is strictly a Sybase shop.
Matus happens to be looking for the same people as many other organizations, and for the same reasons: turnover, new projects, expanding networks and development of new applications. Although every company has some specific needs, certain job titles crop up everywhere.
To find out which jobs will be the hottest this year - by sheer numbers of new hires, not necessarily by salary - we went to several national recruiters and staffing firms for their observations and predictions. The result is the following top 10 list for 2001.

Web developer
In nearly unanimous agreement, recruiters and staffers say that Web developers have quickly surpassed all other job titles in sheer demand. Companies need not just one person but whole teams of Java-experienced developers to design and build the endlessly increasing applications for the Internet.
"Everybody needs 'em. Nobody wants to try to recruit 'em," says Jeannie Jones, president of IT Search Professionals Inc., a national recruiting firm in Cape Coral, Fla.
"Everything I use to manage is a Web-based application," says George Demetriou, who manages contractors nationally for WorldCom Inc. He does his performance appraisals, processes travel expenses and almost everything else via the Web. "And most of those applications we use you cannot just buy off the shelf and use it - we either have to develop it in-house or buy it and modify it and maintain it," he says.
That means there's lots of demand for developers. "There is the whole Java and e-business area, but mainly, it's the old systems, [with businesses] looking for creative ways to Web-enable them," says Matus.
That also means that Matus is looking for someone who not only knows the Java language but