As one of the leading IT Recruiters in the nation we work on dozens of Networking Engineering and Systems Engineering positions every year. In the past 12 months our IT Recruiters have seen an influx of network related resumes coming in as companies made cuts and have changed their hiring strategies.

Here are two hiring patterns we have witnessed from our clients:

1. Jack of all trades have come back into style. At one point we saw many hiring managers deciding to split up roles and bring on highly specialized people with the hopes to decrease downtime. Now with headcount reductions the jack of all trades engineer has come back into style. Over a 5 year period one client went from one engineer doing it all to having one network engineer, one systems administrator and one person dedicated directly to Citrix, only to revert back to the one man army as IT budgets have been cut.

2. Security is never going away. This is something we said 15 years ago as several on our staff came from prior corporate technology careers; security is only going to grow. As one recruiter here said, “the first time I ever installed a Cisco Pix when they first came out it had me thinking as the Internet grows and the world becomes more connected security is only going to get more complicated and more important”.

Where you once had to have your network engineer buddy install your home WIFI router, they can now be installed by just about anyone. But in the corporate world our clients have a higher demand for those with a solid security background than we have seen in 15 years. In terms of security they are looking for someone that knows how to manage patches, virus protection strategies, web monitoring, firewall configurations and monitoring, high security remote access and internal auditing.

In the next 5 years if you’re sitting on a CISSP with a decent background in network and systems security – the future is bright.