10/5/2004 -- Cisco certified professionals have traditionally fared pretty well in IT staffing firm Robert Half Technology’s quarterly survey of enterprise CIOs, and the outlook for Q4 2004 is no exception.

Each quarter, Robert Half asks CIOs to identify the specific skill sets that are most in demand in their enterprise IT departments. The IT staffing firm also tries to get a feel for whether CIOs plan to make any substantive changes to their current employment levels. In the most recent survey, which includes responses from more than 1,400 CIOs from companies with 100 or more employees, 51 percent of CIOs cited Cisco network administration as a high-demand specialty, good enough for second place overall behind Microsoft Windows administrators, with 80 percent. (CIOs could identify more than one in-demand specialty.) An equal number of CIOs (51 percent) expressed a need for CheckPoint firewall skills.

And it appears that the demand for Cisco certified professionals keeps rising: As of Q4, Cisco IT pros are a hotter commodity than they were earlier this year, when just over one-third of CIOs were typically identifying Cisco expertise as an in-demand skill area on a quarter-to-quarter basis. In the first two quarters of this year, for example, just 34 percent and 38 percent of CIOs cited Cisco network administration as a high-demand specialty, third behind Windows and Microsoft SQL Server administration. In the latest quarter, demand for SQL Server skills dropped to fourth place, at 48 percent.

On a related note, the once-beleaguered networking sector is fully on the road to recovery. Earlier this year, 21 percent of CIOs said networking is a valuable skill set in their organizations – tops among all professions. For Q4, 19 percent of executives cited networking as the skill area experiencing the most growth in their organization. Once again, that’s tops among all professions.

How’s the IT hiring outlook on the whole? For the upcoming quarter, nine percent of CIOs say that they plan to hire additional full-time staff, while only three percent anticipate reducing staff. That still means that almost 90 percent of CIOs don’t expect to make any staff level changes, however. -Stephen Swoyer