Date: February 8, 2011

Steve Kalisher
SKalisher@stevendouglas.com

2010 was a promising year for the information technology job market in South Florida. As the year progressed, the demand for IT resources increased. By the end of the year, it was obvious that the IT job market was on its way back. Companies that were keeping a tight hold on their purse strings, awaiting the upturn of the economy, started to make tactical hires in early 2010. More strategic hires were made towards the end of the year. Firms hiring IT professionals found available talent on the street early on, due to the poor economy. Towards the end of the 2010, most of the high demand and quality IT talent found gainful employment. Companies have increasingly come back to Steven Douglas Associates to help them identify and successfully recruit IT professionals.
The 2011 job market started off strong and will continue building momentum as more job opportunities become available. Specific IT positions in areas such as collaboration, data warehousing and business intelligence continue to be high in demand.  New developments in the mobile communications arena are creating jobs for software engineers working in iPhone, Android, and J2ME environments.
These are exciting times as many firms are re-engineering their business processes and looking to information technology professionals to help drive that change. A $600 million distributor with a long history of success hired Steven Douglas Associates in late 2010 to identify and recruit a new CIO. The executive was hired to establish an e-commerce operation for a business that was strictly a brick and mortar distributor.  The company’s paradigm shift created job openings for IT specialists that were needed to drive and support the change. Numerous other companies are looking at their business processes to improve performance by joining the Internet age, or making strategic changes that create a competitive advantage for their firm. The 2011 job market looks promising as more companies hire information technology professionals to move forward with these changes.

Sincerely,

Steve Kalisher
Executive Vice President
SKalisher@stevendouglas.com

*US Department of Labor, August 2010; seasonally adjusted