Title: CEO

Organization: The Brokers Group LLC, Princeton, N.J.

By most accounts, the economy is on an upward trajectory, with corporate profits growing, unemployment rates low and demand for skilled labor -- including business-savvy technologists -- leading to tighter market conditions. Contrast that with 2000 and 2001, when the dot-com bubble burst, resulting in widespread layoffs, overworked IT departments and a sharp rise in the use of offshore IT labor. So, what happened to those IT workers who lost jobs in the first few years of the new millennium? Many of them left the IT market and never came back, says Dan Reynolds of The Brokers Group, a regional staffing service. Computerworld's Thomas Hoffman spoke to Reynolds about those vanished IT workers and other market trends.

How would you characterize the IT labor market? Is there strong demand for certain types of skills? There's strong demand in certain vertical industries. There's more money in the economy, and our business almost tracks the economy like a mirror. We're seeing strong demand for people with solid project-management skills. We're also seeing strong demand for sophisticated Java -- specifically J2EE -- folks. People with Microsoft .Net skills are extremely popular right now. Within these skill sets, clients are also looking for people with vertical-industry expertise, like pharmaceutical or biotech experience.

We're seeing strong demand for Oracle database administrators and a need for Unix systems administrators. We're also seeing a lot on the data warehousing/business intelligence side.