Could sunnier days be ahead for gloomy IT professionals? Some IT pros apparently think so, according to a survey released this week by Hudson, a staffing, outsourcing, and human-capital consulting unit of Hudson Highland Group.

Since the beginning of the year, Hudson has conducted monthly Hudson Employment Index phone surveys with nearly 9,000 workers in various professions in industries including health care, aerospace and defense, financial services, and IT. The survey measures levels of optimism among workers based on their perceptions about job market prospects, personal finances, and whether their own employers are hiring.

In July, optimism scores among IT workers reached a high for the year so far--a rating of 112.1, compared with the base score of 100. That's a large spike since May, when optimism among IT pros hit a low, at 101.1, says Kevin Knaul, executive VP of Hudson's IT practice. The July optimism score for IT pros was also higher than the average worker optimism across all industries, which rated a 108.4.

What does all this mean? Knaul says that for one thing, IT pros are beginning to feel more confident about their ability to land new work if they lose their current jobs. In all, 36% of the IT workers surveyed say they expect their employers to be hiring in coming months, compared with only 33% across all industries. Yet, despite that overall optimism among IT pros, they are also more worried about losing their jobs--26% of IT workers report job insecurity, compared with only 18% of workers across all industries.

Knaul attributes some of that job uncertainty to offshore outsourcing. "There's anxiety out there," which Knaul says is based more on fear rather than the reality of how much offshore outsourcing is actually occurring.

The most optimistic workers in July were in finance and accounting, which rated a 118.1; and the most pessimistic were in manufacturing, which rated a 100.9 score.

As for Hudson's employer clients, IT spending seems to be on an uptick, says Knaul. Companies are looking to hire IT workers--both contract and full time--with skills in network architecture, wireless technologies, PeopleSoft and Oracle ERP software, and especially security.

Ironically, the desire to hire IT security experts is "at the top of the radar screen," particularly at companies that have done offshore outsourcing, he says.

Meanwhile, others cautiously agree that new work prospects for IT talent are starting to recover--slowly.

Demand for IT consultants is also slowly rebounding, although pay is still lower than before the economy turned sour a few years ago, says Cameron Fuller, an IT consultant at Born Information Services Inc. in Dallas. "Work is picking up," he says, particularly as companies who had frozen IT budgets for the last several years are beginning to refresh stale technologies.

"They're starting to open up their purse strings," Fuller says. Since many companies haven't refreshed their PCs and software for years, their own internal IT staffers are lacking skills related to products and technologies like Windows 2003 and .Net, he says, and that's where the contractors are being called in.