For Ed Albrigo, vice president of enterprise programs at Freddie Mac, the talk of a coming shortage in IT workers is more than idle chitchat. It's already here. In fact, Albrigo's IT staffing challenges date back three years.

Most of the $36.5 billion mortgage financing provider's operations are in McLean, Va., an offshoot of being chartered by the federal government 35 years ago. "Here in the Washington metropolitan area, we see a real squeeze for talent given that the federal government is here, as are a lot of telecom companies and Internet companies," says Albrigo, who now spends half his working hours on hiring issues.

To cope with the tight labor market, Freddie Mac decided this year to hire from other locations for its 300 to 400 open IT positions. About 1,600 staff in IT operations and development, or one-third of the company, will stay in the Washington, D.C., area, where they have always lived and worked. But Freddie Mac's new IT hires are likely to come from - and operate out of - Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta, where the company also has offices.

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This major change in Freddie Mac's IT hiring strategy reflects how hard it has gotten to find the right people with skills such as network infrastructure and application development, Albrigo says. "We've decided to look to these other markets to tap critical IT skills and do more of a distributed IT development," he says.

Click to see: Job growth

Freddie Mac piloted the strategy in Chicago by hiring a vice president to create the application-development arm for the loan prospecting group. With six new hires in Chicago, Albrigo expects to end the year with 150 developers situated there.

The pendulum has swung again. IT professionals who just recently began to breathe easy in their jobs after the bruising downturn at the beginning of the century are waking up today to find themselves hotly pursued once more. Salaries are up. Signing bonuses and competitive offers are back.

"IT workers are very bullish on their lots in life right now," says Bennett Ockrim, vice president at Spherion Professional Services, a provider of contract IT labor in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "There is a renewed optimism."

Ed Albrigo, vice president of enterprise programs at Freddie Mac.

Click to see: Ed Albrigo, vice president of enterprise programs at Freddie Mac

Spherion's clients use the firm to pick up the slack for their long-term job openings, Ockrim says. The balance of power has shifted back to the employee rather than the employer, as had been the case for the past few years. "I've seen a rising wave of demand for the past six to 12 months. Without a doubt, it is an employee market right now," he says.