Sometimes an infographic is worth 1,000 words, and this one from online education firm Udemy, depicts what it calls the “arms race” for tech talent in a competitive IT employment marketplace. Some of the major points to ponder:

• By 2015, 60 percent of the new jobs being created will require special skills held by only 20 percent of the population. That’s way up from 1991, when less than half of U.S. jobs required skilled workers.
• Mobile and cloud-based applications are all the rage, and Web development is also causing a rush of competitive hiring activity, especially in Silicon Valley.
• After hitting a peak in the 2003-2004 academic year, computer science degrees have been on a steady decline. That means that the talent already out there is getting aggressively poached. Software engineers are sitting pretty.

Industry watchers with a long historical view may be watching such increasingly heated reports about job poaching and multiple employment opportunities with a wary eye. Remember, the bubbly days of the dot-com boom weren’t all that long ago. Still, the momentum toward more workforces equipped with network-connected mission-critical apps on laptops and smartphones, along with an increasing number of money-saving cloud-based software implementations, shows no signs of slowing. At this particular moment, the excitement around these new frontiers of software development seems justified.

Source: Udemy Photo: Keith Allison via Wikimedia