A good network engineer is hard to find

If you are a network engineer or network architect, you’re a wanted man or woman. At least for now.

Gartner has published some selected findings from its annual IT market compensation study. In it’s new publication, “CIO Alert: Jobs and Skills Topping the Difficult-to-Recruit-For List in the U.S.”, Gartner identified network engineer and network architect as thefourth and fifth most difficult positions to fill. And it’s only getting harder for them to find you.

The percentage of CIOs who said network engineers are very difficult to extremely difficult to find rose from 14.1% in 2006 abd 16.6% in 2007 to 20.3% in 2008.

The demand for network architects has fluctuated a little more. About 18.2% of CIOs said they had a very to extremely difficult time finding engineers in 2006. That number sank to 15.2% in 2007 and then shot back up to 19.8% in 2008.

The only jobs which are harder to fill are enterprise architect, database administrator and ERP programmer/analyst.

Now I know what many of you are thinking. With the economy hurtling towards some sort of apocalypse, will any company be in a position to hire anyone in 2008 or 2009? Gartner does mention in its research note that IT recruitment continues to be a top challenge for IT organizations even in current economic conditions. Of course, this survey data was collected in February, before people starting use the term “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” on a daily basis. At least network engineers and architects have a little bit of an advantage over security analysts and bsuiness analysts and… COBOL programmers.