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, CEO of The Brokers Group LLC, a Princeton, N.J.-based regional staffing service that caters to pharmaceutical, health care, financial services and media companies from Manhattan to Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. Computerworld's Thomas Hoffman spoke to Reynolds today about those vanished IT workers and other current market trends.

How would you characterize the current IT labor market? Is there strong demand for certain types of skills? We're seeing a lot of that; 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.

From a database and data storage standpoint, we're also 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. Clients are asking 'How do we analyze the data, how do we make the data work in a more efficient manner?'

Is increased demand driving higher wages? What we saw last year was a leveling of wages. Last year was the first time our clients weren't pushing back on wages. In 2006, we're seeing an increase in wages. Quality talent is scarcer, so people are recognizing they need to be more flexible around compensation.

We're also seeing [IT] teams a little bit better staffed than they were in the past. With people working 12 to 15 hours a day every day, and short staffed, it's unsustainable. Companies are having to add people.