InformationWeek

Internet Job Market Soaring

Many companies are reassigning and recruiting talent for Net-related posts

Edited by Marianne Kolbasuk McGee
Issue date: Aug. 26, 1996

If you don't mind having a title like "senior Net wizard" on your business card, you may want to redirect your career toward the Internet. While many IS organizations have filled Internet-related posts by reassigning current staffers, they are also beginning to recruit new talent heavily.

About 100,000 new Net-related jobs will have been created by the end o f this year, on top of the 35,000 such jobs created in the United States in 1995, according to Christian & Timbers, a national IT job search firm in Cleveland. While not all the new jobs are for work within IS shops--some are positions at Internet startups or business units--many of the positions require traditional IT skills in addition to agility with the World Wide Web, according to job recruiters and IS managers.

For instance, Internet positions created this year at Personal Library Software Inc. required many of the same skill sets as traditional systems administrators, says Joan Adolphson, a human resources specialist at the PC software developer in Rockville, Md. Yet for the position of Web site administrator, Personal Library Software hired someone from outside the company who had experience with the Net.

"There is a great deal of demand in the market for people who have specific experience and understanding of the Web in addition to other, more mainstream skills," she says. "It was a chal lenge to fill that position."

There is nothing mainstream about the job titles for which headhunters are being asked to find talent: Net wizard, electronic services coordinator, and World Wide Web engineer.

Xerox has added two new groups of IS employees: the "office of the Internet" and "office of the intranet," each with about 12 technical people. The office systems vendor has filled most of those positions with existing staffers, shifting or expanding their IS duties, says CIO Pat Wallington. The company may recruit additional employees--but with caution. "When and if the Internet becomes as mainstream as client-server has become," Wallington says, "you don't want to have a glut of people whose skills are very narrowly focused."

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