RHT: 5 Below the Radar IT Jobs that are Increasing in Demand

by John Reed  Robert Half Technology
February 6, 2014


These under-the-radar jobs are increasingly in demand.

There’s a lot written on the highest demand IT jobs, and many of them feature glamorous job titles like Mobile Application Developer, Big Data Scientist, Cloud Computing Architect, and so on.
The rise of many of these job titles has been well documented and continues to grab the headlines. With that said, there are some IT jobs that continue to increase in demand and create employment opportunities — they just don’t quite receive the publicity that others do. Here are my top five roles that continue to increase in market demand without as much fanfare:

• Business Systems Analyst – With the increasing complexity associated with business problems, demand for BSA’s has increased as companies seek out professionals to assess how automated systems can be implemented to solve their complex business issues. Classically trained BSA’s are helping companies in increasing numbers gather data and formulate recommendations that meet the needs of the business units and end users alike.
• Quality Assurance Analyst – With the increase in demand for Application Programmers and Software Engineers, organizations have found it critical to remove non-essential tasks from the development team to allow them to maximize their software development time. Therefore, companies are hiring QA Analysts in increasing numbers to free up their software developers to remain focused on writing more code and moving the development and execution of software test plans to QA Analysts and Testers.
• Project Manager – Technology initiatives continue to be approved and funded in increasing numbers as organizations strive to realize productivity improvements, improve the quality of business decisions, etc. With that said, the pressure is intense to realize a return on investment as quickly as possible. Having a Project Manager to manage and coordinate these intricate, multifaceted projects has become increasingly important to the success of these initiatives.
• Help Desk Level II/III – As the computing environment becomes increasingly complex, researching and resolving the more difficult and complex computing problems is increasingly challenging for organizations. Advanced Help Desk level skills are more challenging for organizations to locate and are in increasing demand.
• Network Administrator – At Robert Half Technology, we’ve conducted workplace surveys for years and Network Administrator is always one of the most in demand, difficult to fill roles for organizations. Network reliability is paramount in almost every organization and having strong network troubleshooting, analytic and diagnostic skills on the team are highly important and thus in increasing demand.

It’s a great time to be in IT and the continued employment opportunities look incredibly bright. While technology is changing at a rapid pace, there are many IT jobs a bit off the grid that continue to be highly coveted by organizations in the marketplace. This is quick snapshot of five below the radar IT jobs that I continue to hear in my travels.

As always, we would like to hear from you as well on trends your seeing in the marketplace in the comments section below.

Thank you.



— John Reed

John Reed is the senior executive director of Robert Half Technology. He can usually be found racking up frequent flyer miles each week traveling to RHT offices across North America and speaking to industry groups about technology hiring trends. When he’s not on the go, he serves as an armchair quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners. Follow him on Twitter @JReedRHT.