According to the peak industry body, the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), demand is rising annually by 8 to 12 per cent -- and that demand is increasingly hard to meet.

``We are facing a skills gap,'' warned AIIA's education training manager Michel Hedley. ``If the gap widens, it will heavily affect the industry and the economy.''

This gap though is increasingly not the by-product of a lack of absolute numbers, but the churn in demand for skills, which creates a skills gap between what is available and what is needed.

The programmer whose Ada skills might have been prized last year may this year be out of favour, and be replaced by a Java expert.

Whatever its root, the gap between skills demand and skills supply certainly exists. Later this month, a two-day seminarwill be held in Sydney, organised by IES Conferences, which will examine strategies for overcoming it.

The US already battles a skills gap of up to 500,000, which has a cascade effect on Australia, as the market for IT employment is now global and top Australian talent is regularly poached for lucrative overseas postings.Hedley said that the AIIA was attempting to size Australia's shortage, to better tackle the problem, and use the information as a lever to encourage government to improve the quality and quantity of graduates available for employment in IT&T. It was also continuing a campaign to reinforce the need for constant skills update among IT&T employees.

Grant Montgomery, managing director of Executive Leasing Australia, confirmed this. There was ``a shortage of people with really good skills'', particularly in emerging markets such as Web design and electronic commerce, and in data warehousing, he said. Estimates point to 4,000-plus Australians already working in the Internet economy, but demandcontinues to escalate.``There are also transitory shortages in the Y2K area, but we have not noticed as much shortage as the enormity of the problem might suggest,'' said Montgomery.

James de Siun, director of recruitment firm Olmec Consulting, believes this phenomenon is due to the fact that there ``are a lot of crossed fingers regarding the year 2000. Although it's six or seven years since the recession, no-one wants to overstaff (to meet Y2K needs); everyone recalls the era of downsizing.''

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has, since the recession, been tracking a number of recruitment sectors, and indexing them to monitor just how fast a sector is expanding.

IT&T has consistently proved the fastest growth market, with demand rising 11-fold since the recession, according to Montgomery.

Next-fastest growth has been in the finance sector, although growth was only about half that enjoyed in IT&T.

Taking advantage of this demand is a raft of recruitment firms specialising in the sector.One of thenewest is Olmec Consulting, formed by Morgan & Banks veterans Kevin Charman and James de Siun.

Reflecting the flux in the industry it serves, Charman noted that he had ``been in recruitment for 14 years, and it has changed more in the last 12 to 18 months than in the previous five years''.

``There is an unprecedented number of players and more companies doing their own internal IT recruitment than ever before,'' he said. IT recruitment had gone from being ``a business to an industry''.

Beside coping with demand, the recruiters and the recruited are facing a different employer landscape.

The large internal IT shops of the past are just that -- a thing of the past. Witness Westpac's shrinkage from a 6,000-strong powerhouse in the 1980s to about 2,500 now, Charman said.

There is more use of outsourcers than ever before. Contractors are in vogue. Large projects are often completed by large consulting houses, and managed by external project managers.

``The biggest recruiters today are IBM GSA andEDS,'' Charman said. That again changes the nature of the skills required for a role.

For example, Charman said the advent of outsourcing now meant that an IT director needed more project management skills than straight technology nous, and the ability to manage often quite complex relationships.

Top IT directors making that transition might have expected their salaries to have risen as much as 25 per cent over the past two years, with chief information officers regularly earning $200,000-plus a year. Further down the chain, the salary increases (except for scarce skills pockets) haven't been as meteoric.

While demand and pay remains high, the salary spirals of the past are no longer so obvious.

However, recruiter Michael Page Technology claims a salary survey in the technology sector ``is almost redundant the day it's printed''. Charman disagreed. ``This is the first time in a decade we are seeing salaries stagnating,'' he said.

Both agree, though, that specialists with scarce skills remain in asellers market.

According to Charman, thanks to Y2K, ``a good Cobol programmer can earn $70 an hour, which is more than a C++ programmer''.

And Michael Page notes that network operators, architects, Internet specialists, and those with NT skills can command a premium. Skills in ``fashionable'' software such as SAP, BAAN and PeopleSoft are also scarce.``There is no doubt, as well, that demand for Web talent will spike the price employers will have to pay this year,'' said Amada Perille, director of Michael Page Technology.

``The rise of 24-hour, Web-based electronic commerce, spanning global networks, building a non-stop network minimising downtime and reducing the impact of unforeseen events, is going to become more critical across all businesses and may even become a matter of survival.

``Over the next couple of years, we see this area of recruitment overtaking all other areas of demand.''

One overarching trend, however, identified by Charman, is that there is some stabilising taking place aroundthe overall numbers in the market, although the skills mix will continue to change in lockstep with the underpinning technology shifts.

As De Siun noted, ``People are trying to do a lot more with a lot less.''As in any other industry, IT&T offers no employment guarantee. Olmec's recommendations for people who want to continue to have a job in the sector over the next decade is: ``Find a job in a big-six company; offer expert delivery of solutions; develop good project-management skills; deliver on time, on budget and keep your customers happy.''