The economy has improved for graduates hitting the field with computer science degrees.  According to Dice.com, companies are planning to hire almost 20% more graduates this year.

Last year was tough for many people trying to get in, graduates and experienced workers alike.  Employers were averaging roughly 40 applicants for every open position.  That average has dropped significantly to about 21 applicants this year.  With job creation running at a generally consistent clip for some time, graduates are starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel.

Demand for skills reaches across the IT field.  Networking and storage skills are being sought by those gearing up to be a Cloud vendor.  Security skills are in demand in both corporate and government.   Application developers for web, mobile and software are finding homes in small as well as enterprise-level employers.

Computer science graduates can supplement their degrees with focused skill training in the hottest IT topics of today.  GogoTraining is a leading provider of high-quality training taught by industry experts, available online and affordable (even for graduates!).  Example areas of interest include:

• Android developer training
• Linux administration and programming training
• Microsoft server training
• Oracle database administration training
• Java programming training
• C programming training
• Business Intelligence training
• I/O and Storage training
• ITIL Foundations and Intermediate training
• IT Security training

The emphasis on combining technology with business sense continues where it comes to the desires of CIOs.  The main problem they are facing is the need for IT to transition more into being focused on the business rather than the technical infrastructure of the business.

According to DiceTV, CIOs are seeking “innovative developers who can weave social, mobile and collaborative technology features into their designs.”  In order to survive and thrive in the new era of IT one needs to have technical and business skills.

We’ve talked before about how those in networking positions in IT departments will need to evolve negotiation and management skills in order to deal with an increasingly cloud-bound infrastructure environment.  New skills will include security and analytics as protecting and working with data will be major undertakings going forward.

Getting credible training in critical areas is easy to do with GogoTraining.  Taught by industry experts, GogoTraining course are actual classroom training courses brought into an online, self-paced and affordable format (thanks to GogoTraining’s unique business model).

Check out the online IT training course catalog or take a look at these specific areas:

• Build technical management skills using ITIL training courses and certification.
• Develop security skills using GogoTraining IT security training courses.
• Gain widely-used development skill sets with Java training courses and Oracle database administration training courses.

The Oracle Certification blog ran a poll to find out what certifications people “intend to pursue in 2011” and the results held a few items of interest.

The results:

• 58% plan to pursue database certification.
• 35% plan to pursue Java certification.
• 29% plan to pursue PL/SQL.
• Almost 7% intend to pursue Solaris certification.

That Oracle DBA certifications were on top is no surprise as that has always been Oracle’s big deal.  While nobody expected Solaris to rank high it does seem to be somewhat lower.  Java certification certainly looks strong and shows a good addition to Oracle’s suite of professional IT certifications.  So the top three truly most sought-after certifications are for database, Java and PL/SQL (really a subset of the DBA certification list).

Learn more about training for Oracle database certifications.  GogoTraining also offers outstanding Java training courses along with a host of other technologies in the online IT training course catalog.

• Oracle Database Certification training
• Java training courses
• Oracle 11g PL/SQL Programming Part 1
• Oracle 11g PL/SQL Programming Part 2

AMD, the multinational semiconductor producer, is hiring over 1,000 IT professionals across their global operations in anticipation of the enterprise movement toward Cloud Computing.

The highest portion of new hires will be focused on design and verification and will be recruited at all AMD facilities including Boston, Orlando, California, Texas and in Canada.

Given AMD’s support of open-source software, engineers with Linux, C/C++, Ruby, and Java are going to be a focus of hiring on the software side.  In hardware, analog design engineers with backgrounds in electrical engineering, CISI and ASIC design abilities will be hired.

AMD plans to meet the new cloud market with software and hardware products and expects to leverage the same entrepreneurial ethos that has served them well in the past. Lance Phillips, Global Talent Acquisition Leader for AMD, defines this as, “candidates and employees who are good fit are those who like to work beyond typical boundaries and beyond a job description.”

GogoTraining has introductory and advanced courses in the majority of technologies being sought after by AMD and other large employers gearing up for the cloud (or just gearing up to compete in the emerging economy).  Check out the online IT training course catalog for more details.

Starting August 1, 2011, Oracle will introduce a new requirement for those seeking certification for Java Architect, Java Developer, Solaris System Administrator and Solaris Security Administrator.

Under the new qualification criteria, IT professionals will be required to attend hands-on training provided by approved, instructor-led courses.  According to the announcement on the Oracle education website, self-study courses on CD-ROM or recorded web courses do not meet the requirement.

The courses listed on the Oracle education website last from three to five days and cost roughly $2,000 to almost $4,000.  They must be taken through Oracle University Training Center, Oracle Authorized Education Center or Oracle Authorized Education Partner, Oracle Workforce Development, or Oracle Academy and approved programs.

From now through July 31, professionals can still get certified based on the current requirements.

Three well-know technology companies have turned up the volume on hiring and are looking for technologists in key fields.

Kabam, a game development company known for their Kingdoms of Camelot title (voted Best Facebook Game in 2010), is looking to hire more take in an additional 600 employees with a focus on skills such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, CSS, Java and Flash.  Those involved in data center engineering and maintenance are also needed as they serve their games.

GoDaddy, the world’s top hosting provider and domain registrar, continues to experience growth even through the tough economy (wherein it doubled in size in less than four years).  They hope to hire around 350 people.  While most will be in customer service and call center, around one third will focus on skills such as network engineering, quality assurance, .NET engineering, SQL and Linux.

IBM is also looking for a lot of new people, with over 2,200 positions open on Dice.com at the moment.  Regions of particular focus are Washington D.C., Ohio, Los Angeles, San Fransisco and San Diego.  Particular skills being sought include networking, integration, SAP, SAN, Oracle, Java and Unix.

GogoTraining offers the following online training courses to help you get up and running for these and other jobs.  Need something different? Check our online training course catalog.

• Introduction to Ruby training course
• Java programming training courses
• Networking training courses
• Oracle training courses
• Project management training and PMP exam prep training courses
• Linux training courses
• ITIL and ITSM training courses

A gap exists between today’s composition of IT groups and what is needed for enterprises to maximize return on systems investments, so say CIOs in a recent survey.

CIO magazine and the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) asked 370 CIOs about the makeup and goals of their organizations.  The CIOs indicated a new “value proposition” for IT was to move beyond building and running systems and into a space that contributes more fundamental business value to the enterprise.  This represents at least a partial shift of responsibility away from other departments who are often tasked with providing the ultimate value out of systems created and maintained by the IT department.

Skills such as vendor managers, IT/business experts, data and analytics experts, and application developers top out where it comes to skill sets needed to make that value proposition a reality.

IT/Business experts are the hybrids we discussed recently, people who have depth in both and are able to tie them together in meaningful ways.  One example are IT service managers who are not necessarily technologists but manage technology for the business.  ITIL certification and project management certification are highly advisable for those in such positions and are sure to be hired first in a glut of applicants.

Application developers will have specific skills that vary depending on the chosen technology.  Particular hot spots include Java, Oracle and Android application development.  Pursuing training in any of these areas is very desirable when seeking to build a strong resume.

GogoTraining continues to create new learning opportunities that allow IT professionals of any experience level to build a foundation for reliable job security and employability.

What area could you train for that would really make your resume stand out?

The latest large employer looking for mobile developers is SAP, one of the leading providers of business software.  Their model of how they meet market demands involves their Global Business Incubator, which essentially is a venture developer that creates nearly autonomous teams of people to act like a start-up company.  These teams are tasked with fulfilling a specific need in the market.

One such new team is the Consumer Mobile Initiative focused on “leveraging consumer’s adoption of smartphones and SAP technology to redefine consumer shopping experience in and around the store” (per many of the current SAP job postings for developers).  The new team has already developed market pilots with a handful of leading retailers and consumer product concerns in the American and European markets.

Specific areas of growth in SAP will be mobile development, cloud computing and security as they continue to pursue development using their Global Business Incubator model.

Those interested in meeting the need of SAP and other enterprise software providers in these growing areas can make use of IT training courses from GogoTraining, such as:

• Android Development Training Program.
• Cloud Computing training courses.
• Security training courses.
• Oracle training courses.
• Java training courses.

In recent years, Java was on the potential down slope as advancement on the language was lacking and developers started investigating languages that would run atop Java environments.  Despite the OpenJDK continuing to be attended to and Java tools continuing to grow, Java seemed to be shuffling about with uncertain direction.  Now, thanks to a new generation of big developments, the venerable language is proving its mettle as a backbone for innovation.

Take cloud computing for instance.  Amazon and others have launched major hiring sprees for 2011 to bring in software engineers in order to support development of their cloud computing services.  In particular, Amazon’s Elastic Complete Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Web Services divisions are looking to swell by at least several hundred software engineers alone.  What skill is in demand? Java.

Next up: operating system development.  What platform has erupted as the next big deal for smartphones? Android, Google’s operating system that took top spot for smartphone market share in the fourth quarter of 2011 (with 32.9% of global market).  Android’s software stack is made up of Java apps running on a Java-based object-oriented application framework.

Being integral to next-generation operating systems easily demonstrates Java’s continued fitness as a powerful and reliable foundation.  On top of it, application development continues to benefit from Java with mobile app development for Android being done primarily in that language.

Devices like Amazon’s Kindle, Sony Ericsson’s line of web-enabled media phones, and the Blu-ray Disc format all benefit from Java.  Software such as Alice, Carnegie Mellon’s free programming environment to Google Maps (who hasn’t used that?) to Nuesoft, the leading web-based medical management software (and one of the pioneers in SaaS) all found their foundations in Java.

If considering a programming language that will sustain years of productivity and innovation and can demonstrate a history of doing the same, programming professionals should look to Java.

GogoTraining provides the following Java training courses taught by industry experts:

Java Programming
Introduction to Groovy
Introduction to Programming in Java 5 Part 1
Introduction to Programming in Java 5 Part 2
Programming in Java 6 with Swing and Servlets Part 1
Programming in Java 6 with Swing and Servlets Part 2

Java EE Training
Developing Java Server Pages (JSPs) using Eclipse and Tomcat
Developing Servlets Using Eclipse & Tomcat
 
Java Frameworks and Platforms Courses
Introduction to Hibernate
Introduction to Struts
Java Development with JBoss Application Server

Amazon has been moving itself into position to be a leading cloud and storage provider through Amazon Web Services. They recently posted a great many more jobs on technology job sites such as Dice.com.

Particular skills being sought include software engineering in Java or Ruby. Also those with strong networking protocol knowledge such as iSCSI, NFS v3/v4, CIFS or SMB. Developers and designers with knowledge and background around these technologies are sure to do well with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Web Services divisions.

As usual, with an enterprise as large as Amazon investing heavily in a leading-edge technology field, project managers with experience and PMP certification will also be in need.

GogoTraining has what you need to dive right in to these great Cloud Computing jobs!

• Need to beef up on Java? See the GogoTraining list of Java programming training courses.
• Ready for Ruby? Then it’s time for Introduction to Ruby.
• Learn more about GogoTraining Project Management PMP certification preparation courses.