'This is a long-standing issue,' said Kate Kaiser, an associate professor of IT at Marquette University in Milwaukee and the report's primary author. 'But it's now more important than ever to have business skills. Companies are more aware than ever [about] what IT can do for them.'

In contrast to the layoffs and hiring freezes that graduates faced at the start of the decade after the dot-com crash, the overall IT workforce is expected to remain stable until at least 2008, according to the report.

While some jobs, especially technical ones at larger organizations, continue to be outsourced, the IT jobs most likely to be retained and created in-house will emphasize business and management skills such as business process re-engineering or project planning, rather than purely technical skills, according to the report. That offers great opportunities to young IT workers with the right skills and mind-sets, said Kaiser. She pointed to two former students who were promoted from programming to project management jobs in just two years rather than the five or more years such a climb typically requires.

'The time period one spends as a programmer is becoming compressed,' she said.

'The average age of CIOs I meet today is five years younger than it was a decade ago,' said Stephen Pickett, president of SIM and the CIO of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based trucking company Penske Corp.