The Foundation’s first-ever Linux Jobs Report is now available as a downloadable PDF file. They also have an interview with a Dice.com person who says, “It’s not a surprise to us that Linux talent is in demand, but what is surprising is the fact that 85 percent of companies report having difficulty finding qualified Linux professionals.”

So, qualified Linux professional, that means you are in demand!

And if you are not a qualified Linux professional, you may want to become one.

At the very least, install Linux on a computer or two at home and start messing with it. Which distributions? Probably Red Hat clone CentOS, and purist favorite Debian, not because they’re the easiest to use, but because they’re what you’re most likely to find in an enterprise installation.

It’s also okay to cheat and start out with Debian-derived Ubuntu, which is more GUI-oriented than Debian or Red Hat (or Red Hat clone CentOS).

You can get plenty of free Linux help from Linux User Groups. That’s a Wikipedia link. Using the search terms “Linux User Group” or “LUG” and the name of the nearest major city or town to you in Google is almost certain to turn up a LUG near you. Even if there’s not one that has meetings that are convenient for you to attend, there are plenty of LUGs whose primary “meetings” are email lists or IRC channels. F2F or online, Linux users are generally helpful if you ask politely for aid rather than demanding it in a huff.

Many community colleges and most universities offer some sort of Linux classes. And there are Linux certifications galore you can obtain by taking tests. Rather than hashing through all of them here, I’ll give you a link to a Google search for “Linux certification” that will give you an overwhelmning amount of information.

Another great reason to start playing with Linux is that it’s fun. In fact, once you get used to running Linux and other Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), you’ll probably find most proprietary operating systems and software somewhat confining. But this doesn’t mean you should stop using them. As an IT manager friend of mine says, “In my shop there’s no such thing as a Linux sysadmin or a Windows sysadmin.” If you work for me, you’re a sysadmin. Period.”

And unconferences and hackathons and LUGs and so on. These are all seriously good places to meet people who can actually hire you. Plus, the events themselves tend to be both interesting and fun.

So please, get off your duff and go to some of them!

But when it comes to employment, no matter what Franklin said, the choice between freedom and security is not always easy to make.

Consider the work-at-home freelancer’s life: if he or she wants to go sailing in the middle of a workday, who will say no? What about a beer at lunch? Or at breakfast? Or a couple of cocktails for breakfast and a few more at lunch?

Some people have enough self-discipline and self-motivation to refrain from excess boozing when they’re supposed to be working, and to stay on land during working hours — unless they’re caught up on work or willing to put in weekend time to make up for weekday time spent sailing (or going to the park or hanging out with a girl/boyfriend or some other non-work activity).

Franklin said, in a piece titled Advice to a Young Tradesman, “Remember that time is money.”

And so it always has been, not only to tradesmen in Franklin’s day, but also to IT freelancers in the 21st Century. If you cannot manage your working time wisely, you should not be self-employed except for periods “between jobs,” as the old British saying described breaks in employment.

Self-employment means not only maintaining enough self-discipline to complete tasks for your clients on time and on (or under) budget, but also finding clients and getting work to do. And buying health insurance, at least in the USA, where this is one of the most awful parts of being self-employed, especially if you are over 40. Then there’s holidays. Most people who have jobs got July 4 off, with pay. Those of us who work for ourselves did not.

None of this means that working for someone else is always paradise. If it was, there would not be a movie coming out this week called Horrible Bosses.

However, there are plenty of wonderful reasons to get a full-time job, assuming you can find one that matches your skill-set and is with a company you like, doing work you enjoy.

For one thing, you’ll probably get a paycheck every week or two or twice a month without invoicing and hoping you’ll get your money in 30 days, or at least in 60 days, which is a common situation for freelancers. There’s also the joy of company-bought health insurance. Even if you have to pay part of its cost, chances are that you’ll get way better coverage, for way less money, as an employee than as a self-employed consultant or freelancer.

Which should I do: work for myself or for someone else?

The reality is, I cannot answer this question for you. I know people who need the structure of a job and an organized workplace to function, including a neighbor who once said, “I can’t freelance from home because I’d sit on the couch watching sports all day.” This is someone who has a pretty good job now, in an office with a boss watching him work, and is happy about it.

I know other people who have gotten so comfortable working for themselves that it’s doubtful that they’ll ever be able to work full-time for anyone else, ever again — except that “never say never” (NOT a Franklin quote) applies here. Even if you’re a happy, successful freelancer, if your work dries up you may need to work for BoringSoft Development to keep up with your mortgage. Or even (shudder) stock shelves at Wal~Mart or Home Depot if that’s all the work you can find and you seriously need money to buy food.

Times are tough right now. About five times as many Americans are looking for work as there are open jobs. These are bad odds, unless you are in the top 20% of job-seekers — or are, as you probably are if you’re reading this — in some part of the IT industry, where there are more openings and fewer job-seekers than in most fields of employmen.

But no matter what the hiring situation is at the moment, self-employment is worth a look as an alternative to working for someone else. Just make sure you have the self-discipline and self-motivation — and enough financial reserves — to handle it.

Google News picks up stuff like this. If you’re seriously looking for a new job, you might want to consider setting up a Google News alert containing keywords for the kind of work you want to do.

Caryn says there are plenty of people out there — you’re probably one of them if you’re reading this — who know plenty about IT but little or nothing about how the health care industry works. Conversely, there are plenty of people working in the health care industry who know little or nothing about IT. A large part of what she is working on right now is setting up community college programs like this one, which concentrates on Heath Care IT Workforce Roles.

Right now, this program and others like it around the state are putting a lot of their energy into training “incumbent health care employees,” which means taking people like the office workers you see in doctors’ offices and hospitals, and teaching them how to deal with computer hardware and software. But there’s also a lot of money and energy going into training IT people like you how to deal with the medical environment. Here are three programs at Cosumnes River College whose titles indicate that they’re looking for more IT people than medical people to enter their program:

• Health Care IT Implementation Support Specialist
• Health Care IT Technical Support Specialist
• Health Care IT Trainer (coming fall 2011)

The blurbs for the first two course tracks include this note: “The previous background of workers in this role includes information technology or information management.”

The blurb for the third says: “The previous background of workers in this role includes experience as a health professional or health information management specialist.”

“But I don’t live in California…”

That’s okay. neither do I nor, come to think of it, does a majority of the U.S. population. So we non-Californians go to the HealthInformationExchanges.org site, specifically to the Regional Extension Centers List, and find our local equivalent of CalHIPSO — and if we’re lucky we find someone as helpful for our state’s job-hungry IT people as Caryn Rizell is for our brothers and sisters in California.

A tip of the Zippy the Pinhead pin goes to Joanne Rohde of Axial Exchange, who told me about CalHIPSO and sugggested I write about their efforts to help IT people move into Health IT.

I know the CEO, Larry Augustin, pretty well. In fact, I found out about these jobs because he and I are Facebook friends and he posted SugarCRM’s hiring needs on Facebook.

When you apply, you can tell them I know Larry and that I sent you. It probably won’t do any good, but hey! It’s worth a try, right?