10 top IT skills in demand: a one-day snapshot

The online recruiting site, Dice.com, published the peak demand for leading tech skills on the day of October 1, 2012. 

The leading category -- sought in more than 14,600 job listings -- is for "software developer," which appears to be a catch-all term, but nonetheless implies that individuals with adaptable programming and integration skills within any language or platform have a range of job choices open to them.

Interestingly, SOAP -- the Web services protocol for exchanging messages -- is one of the top skill areas in demand, suggesting there is still a lot of activity in enterprise-level service orientation.  Likewise, employers appear to be hungry for people who can work with the JBoss Application Server, another foundation for enterprise SOA.

Here are the number of job openings for each of the top 10 positions that were seen on October 1st. (By the way, Dice also mentions Windows 7 development skills as the 11th-most-sought-after skill):

1. Software developer          14,616
2. Quality assurance               9,355
3. Python                                3,775
4. SOAP                                  3,217
5. Virtualization                      2,691
6. Ruby on Rails                      2,404
7. Android                               2,204
8. JBoss                                  1,976
9. Information security           1,916
10. MS Dynamics                      1,581

(Thumbnail photo: US Bureau of Labor Statistics.)