Robert Half Technology has published their 2012 IT Salary Guide (worth grabbing a copy of!). They identify the following hot IT skills based on a survey of more than 1,600 CIOs in the United States and Canada:

5 TECH PROFESSIONALS FIRMS WANT NOW

• Systems and networking engineers: Skills – Cloud computing, Software as a Service, Virtualization
• Developers: Skills – .NET, Java, PHP, Silverlight, Flex, MySQL and portal technologies such as SharePoint
• Quality assurance professionals and business analysts
• Data warehousing and business intelligence professionals
• Security professionals

TOP TECHNICAL SKILLS IN DEMAND (after the break…) Read more…

On Wednesday January 18th many of your favorite websites–Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Reddit, Boing Boing and more–will be blacked out for a day to protest two pending pieces of legislation now before the Congress of the United States: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and PROTECTIP (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet, stifle online innovation and creativity, and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States. They appear to violate provisions of the U.S. Constitution by operating with a presumption of guilt and denial of due process, and could seriously harm the integrity of the Internet Domain Name System, particularly ongoing efforts to implement DNSSEC. For more information about this legislation please see the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s site and please contact your Senators and Representative to make your opinion heard.

According to a recent Computerworld survey, the top IT job skills employers will be seeking in 2012 in order of demand are:
1. Programming and Application Development (Especially Web development & Mobile application development)
2. Project Management (Especially those who also have skills as Business Analysts)
3. Help Desk/Technical Support (Especially those who can support mobile devices)
4. Networking (Need fueled in large part by virtualization and cloud computing projects)
5. Business Intelligence (Many need SharePoint developers)
6. Data Center (IT professionals with backgrounds in data center operations and systems integration, and experts in disaster recovery and business continuity)
7. Web 2.0 (HTML5, .Net, AJAX and PHP)
8. Security (Strong technical security and auditing skills)
9. Telecommunications (IP telephony skills)
Read more…

The last day to add courses or to drop them without a fee is January 20th. Please decide very soon what you really want to do this term, and if you are not yet registered, GET REGISTERED! After the final add/drop date, we will add folks to our Microsoft Developer’s Network Academic Alliance software subscription.

Cloud computing is a hot topic these days; if you are considering taking ITM 444/ITM 544 Cloud Computing Technologies in Fall 2012, you should take ITM 456 Introduction to Open Source Operating Systems this spring. It is not a prerequisite, but students who do not have a solid grounding in Linux will be at a distinct disadvantage in the class. (And no one wants to be at at a distinct disadvantage now, do they?)

Social Media Marketing, ITM 495/ITM595, is a last-minute addition for the Spring term. Students in this course will explore the tactics, tools and strategies of incorporating new media channels to successfully grow a business, and/or to maximize the goals of other types of organizations. Topics will include social media components and tactics such as Social Networks, Blogs, Microblogs, Photo Sharing, Audiocasting/Videocasting, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Mobile Apps; social media tools; social media strategies; how to run a business based on social media; and use of social media for customer relationship management (CRM). The course will be taught by Robert VanDame and will meet Tuesday evenings at 6:25pm in Stuart 238 on the Main Campus. Grading for the course will be based on three exams and a Student Project consisting of development of a Social Media Marketing program for a real or fictional organization. If you need a last-minute addition to your schedule this might be the thing.

As a reminder, our BookList is at http://www.itm.iit.edu/data/ITM_Booklist_12S.pdf.

By the way, we hope to add additional seats to all of our closed sections except ITM 461 sometime on Monday.

ITMS 555 Mobile Device Forensics will be offered in Fall 2012. BUT if you want to take it, you must take ITM 538 Computer and Network Forensics first. it will be taught in the spring 2012 semester so you need to do it in the coming term.
Here is a is a PDF file containing:
♦ An updated course description of ITM 538
♦ A description of ITMS 555 as we see it at this time
http://www.itm.iit.edu/data/ITM_Forensic_Courses.pdf

The Data Center Operations and Management specialization has a three course prerequisite chain which begins with ITM 554, Operating System Virtualization, which will be offered in Spring 2012. It is a lab course at the Rice Campus on Wednesday evenings, but there is a bus from the Main Campus. The follow-on courses include ITMT 535 Data Center Architecture in Fall 2012 and ITMM 576 Data Center Management in Spring 2013. These courses have already been identified by some major players in the data center industry as the best offered and will meet an urgent need for data center professionals. If you want to take advantage of this opportunity, start with ITM 554!

If you are working toward completing the security specialization, ITM 588 Incident Response, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity will run this spring on Tuesday evenings at IIT’s Downtown Campus; there are buses there to and from the Main Campus, and it is less than a block from Union Station for those in the suburbs. This is also a course that EVERYONE in the Data Center Operations and Management specialization can take as a key elective in that program. It’s at the Downtown Campus because it’s also offered as part of the Master of Public Administration program in their Disaster Management specialization.

(Note the new course prefixes; there will be a bunch of these next fall) Hope you had a great great holiday–and g0t some rest to be energized for the next term!