From a shortage of skilled IT professionals, the training needed to stay up to date after the crisis, through to cloud computing skills and – again and again – soft skills.

Soft skills is a perennial topic of debate in the IT world all around the world and crops up again, for example, in the article by Jim Vaughan for cio.com, who uncompromisingly describes the inescapable need for project managers to have hard skills, but at the same time stresses that social skills are equally essential when it comes to leading project teams.

Several other articles address the worsening shortage of specialist professionals in the IT industry. A study undertaken by PwC, discussed in an article in the British Recruiter , emphasises the important role of human capital management in meeting this challenge. We are very glad that this study confirms our core competence as a crucial component of an intelligent and sustainable personnel strategy.

Although the IT world has coped remarkably well with the recession, many otherwise indispensable personnel development programmes have fallen prey to budget cuts. As Matthew Poyiadgi rightly concludes in his article for www.computing.co.uk there is now a very real need to make up lost ground.

Ultimately, the ongoing trend towards cloud computing calls for excellent hard skills, particularly in the fields of network engineering, security and compliance, as Brien Posey explains in his article for Redmond Channel Partner.. While entire IT departments disappear in the cloud, professionals who opt to specialise in this field will continue be highly sought after IT specialists in the future.