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)

According to the job site Indeed.com, the top job posting keywords in the field in recent months include:
1. Social Media (especially social media marketing managers)
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) (developing programs in the cloud)
3. jQuery
4. Hadoop
5. Puppet (an automated administrative engine often used in cloud computing)
6. Mobile App Developers
7. Android
8. iOS
9. MongoDB
10. HTML5

IT analyst firm Gartner identifies the following top trends in technology for 2012:
1. Media tablets
2. Mobile-centric applications and interfaces
3. Social and contextual user experience
4. Application stores and marketplace
5. The Internet of everything AKA pervasive computing
6. Next-generation analytics
7. Big data
8. In-memory computing (flash memory)
9. Extreme low-energy servers
10. Cloud computing