Abstract

This article summarizes a longitudinal study of technical skills advertised in the IS job market. A data collection approach that exhibits certain strengths over previously published job skill identification strategies is justified. Approximately 20,000 newspaper position ads in large metropolitan areas of the U.S. were collected over six years to establish the empirical foundations and analyze trends in the requested job skills. The data provides implications applicable to practicing IS managers, general managers, professionals in the IS arena, human resource staff, and educators. In support of previous theory there is a shift in the number and type of skills that a typical IS employee is expected to have. This shift may mean that the new IS professional will be a generalist with a collection of specific technical skills in networking, personal computers, Windows, and relational database technologies which were identified as the top four job skills in this work in progress.

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