This includes business, analysts, project leaders, managers, and systems analysts, said Sapphire Canada president Sergio Mateus.

"We see most of the demand being primarily within the applications development field, not so much on the infrastructure side," he said.

As far as mainframe skills go, the national IT staffing firm is noticing increased demand for IT skills overall and expects the demand for mainframe specialists will rise accordingly.

While the firm hasn't detected a particular rise in interest for mainframe skills yet, the demand for mainstream specialists never really decreased to a great extent either, Mateus pointed out. "Even through the downturn, we've seen the demand stay consistent," he said.

"Within large organizations especially, so many legacy systems still have to be attended to and dealt with that the demand has always been there and I think that going forward, that is going to at the very least stay the same, if not increase," said Mateus.