For Katherine Spencer Lee, creativity is one of the hallmarks for finding and hiring quality IT staff. Lee, executive director of IT staffing firm Robert Half Technology, saw that belief come to life when she sat down this summer in her local movie theater to take in the latest Star Wars epic. There, in the mix of preshow advertisements, was an ad from a company seeking IT help.

"That is a thing of beauty," Lee says. "It's thinking about where these people are. If you are a sci-fi, technology junkie you are in line to go see this movie."

While it appears it would take a lightsaber battle to get director George Lucas to film another such hiring opportunity, IT executives will likely have to turn to other avenues in the coming months to find quality staffers.

In a survey of 1,400 CIOs conducted last month by Lee's firm, 16% of executives polled plan to hire full-time IT staff in the fourth quarter of 2005, while only 4% plan to reduce personnel. The net 12% increase in hiring is the largest net increase since the third quarter of 2002.

But in this employee search, IT executives will have to battle over what surveys show are fewer and fewer qualified applicants.

Click to see: Katherine Spencer Lee

The number of college students who have declared their major in computer science has declined for the past four years and is now 39% lower than in the fall of 2000, according to the Taulbee Survey of the Computing Research Association.

Federal laws that cap the number of foreign workers also might limit the number of candidates. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services last month said that the 65,000-person cap on H-1B visas for fiscal 2006 has already been reached. While that could mean more job openings for American students, the number of qualified students needed to fill jobs might not meet demand, considering the decline in computer science programs enrollment.

As a result, IT executives are taking inventory of what type of personnel they need and where they will find it. They say that while creativity helps, old-school methods seem to fit more with today's IT requirements.

"Executives today need to look beyond traditional technical skills-really what they were looking for in the '80s and '90s," says Jerry Lufman, an executive board member with the Society for Information Management (SIM), a professor at Steven Institute of Technology and a former CIO at IBM. "Now we are looking for skills for effective communication, interpersonal skills and project management skills. Those are the kinds of things that are really high on the list of consideration."

Whitepapers

• Gene Kim's Practical Steps to Mitigate Virtualization Security Risks
• Monitoring and Managing App Performance
• Monitoring and Managing VoIP
• SNMP Monitoring: One Critical Component to Network Management
• SNMP Monitoring: One Critical Component to Network Management
• A Modern Approach to On-Demand Email and Data Security

View more NETWORK MANAGEMENT whitepapers

Webcasts

• Key Considerations for a Successful 802.11n Deployment
• Best Practices for Deploying WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery
• Tips and Techniques for Remote Data Backup and Delivery
• WAN Optimization Landscape
• Lowering the Cost of Email Archives
• The High-Touch Remote Helpdesk: Centralized Support for the Decentralized Organization

View more NETWORK MANAGEMENT webcasts

Special Reports

• Network World Executive GUide: The Virtualization Equation
• Application Performance Management Executive Guide
• Executive Guide: Building a Service Oriented Architecture
• Optimizing Your Network Management Strategy for Today's Economy
• Get More From Your WAN
• Executive Guide: Storage Heats Up

View more NETWORK MANAGEMENT special reports