IT Career Juice Blog

Trying to determine your ideal  IT career path? Want to know which computer jobs will be in the greatest demand, offer the highest salaries and best chances for upward mobility once you finish school? ITCareerFinder assembled this comparison of the decade’s hottest technology careers to serve as a guide. These computer jobs will experience the most growth through 2020, pay salaries well above the national average and offer a wide range of career advancement opportunities.

Compare the top ten IT jobs by growth rate, salary and future jobs creation, then click on your favorite career path(s) for a deep dive job description, featuring skills & responsibilities, desirable certifications, education requirements, training & degree programs, salary analyses, local job openings and tips from active practitioners.

Here are the 10 Best Computer Jobs of the Future:

Cloud computing is often talked about as a technology that will make IT departments obsolete as companies seek to outsource computing needs. This analysis misses the complexity of what's actually happening in IT departments.

The actuality is that cloud technologies are running in conjunction with on-site systems, and many companies are choosing to operate and maintain their own servers - even if they have a few Cloud applications up and running. This adds a layer of complexity to effectively managing the IT needs of an organization. Rather than eliminating the role of in-house IT professionals, the cloud is merely changing the skill set and job functions of the IT department.

In my experience, here are the top 5 skills IT professionals will need to learn to work in cloud computing:

A new report from Dice.com indicates the best IT certifications to help you get a job.

In its 2012 Salary Survey, IT job board Dice.com asked "Which IT certification has helped you earn a new position?" Over 18,000 employed IT professionals and technology executives responded - below are the top eight IT certifications that helped them stand out from the crowd and get hired. Also included are average salaries, experience level and noteworthy hiring trends for each credential.

Here are the IT certifications most likely to land you a new job in 2012:

Do you like money? Do you thrive on intellectual challenge? Are you fascinated by technology? A computer science degree can lead you to a fulfilling IT career on all three counts. Read on for the top benefits of earning a computer science degree...

Kaplan University believes you have the right to make an informed decision about your education. To back up this belief, Kaplan introduced The Kaplan Commitment. The Kaplan Commitment program lets prospective online or campus students attend the first 5 weeks of a degree program at no cost while they decide whether or not to stay and pursue their studies. After five weeks, students can either continue in class, or withdraw without any financial obligation beyond the $45 application fee.

Read on for Kaplan Commitment rules, degree programs, videos and more:

In a tough job market, it pays to be strategic, and to look for positions in industries with the best opportunities for career growth and advancement. ITCareerFinder examined tech job growth rates from the leading unbiased employment sources, including the U.S. Department of Labor - Bureau of Labor Statistics, to identify the fastest growing IT careers for 2012 and beyond.

Here are the top five fastest growing IT career paths:

In Part 1 of this post - Personal Branding Part 1: How to Define Yours - we told you why it’s important to have a personal brand, and how you can define your own. This week, we are going to talk about marketing your brand. There are a lot of ways to promote your personal brand, all of which fall into two categories: Online and Off.

Establishing a personal brand is now a crucial part of a successful job search. Since we think it’s such an important tool for job seekers to understand, and because the experts we spoke to had such good advice, we decided to divide our personal branding post into two parts. Read this then check out part 2 here - Personal Branding Part 2: Marketing Yourself.

The iOS mobile platform exploded onto the scene in 2007 with the first iPhone launch and has been increasing in popularity ever since. With the recent successful releases of its fifth operating system (iOS5) and the iPhone 4S, the beast that is Apple's mobile device segment shows no signs of slowing. The success found by many iPhone Application Developers plus the increasing popularity and versatility of Apple devices have inspired many new and established programmers to become iPad and iPhone Application Developers.

While most web developers share the same goal of bug-free, functional, usable web sites, there are several programming languages developers can use to reach that goal. Let’s compare the major programming language choices available to the modern web developer.

Used strategically, LinkedIn is a powerful tool for online job search. It is however very common for job seekers to ignore the value of LinkedIn, and focus their efforts on the massive job search engines like CareerBuilder and Monster. The big boards should still be part of your online job search strategy, but at times like these you need to use every weapon at your disposal; LinkedIn is the strongest job search tool you never used - or at least never used to its full extent.