Which IT Skills are Hot For Contractors?

[Kanye]

This article lists PM, PMO, BA, 'Contract Delivery' as being the hot skills for contractors:

Which IT skills are still hot for contractors? :: Contractor UK

My experience on the job boards back this up to an extent. When I search in my areas of domain expertise I definetly get more management type roles come back rather than an abundance of Java / .NET / Oracle techy ones. They are often better paid too.

Is this the whole outsourcing & offshoring finally coming home to roost for us on the technical side of the fence?

Should a technical contractor be looking at moving more in the direction of project management and architecture to stay in demand?

[northernladuk]

Common sense.

[nomadd]

Should a technical contractor be looking at moving more in the direction of project management and architecture to stay in demand?

80+ contracts on Jobserve offering £80-100+ / hr using Java. 98 jobs on the permie side offering £100k+ But those are jobs that can't be done by a generic Bob, so stay very technical but also learn additional business skills.

Can't stand PM work. Far, far too much stress for too little reward. And there seem to be plenty of struggling PMs who post regularly on here...

Architect? Interesting. I did pure architecture for a while up until 5 years ago, when I saw programmer jobs overtake it rate wise. Again, there were plenty of posts on here about it (in fact one guys sig. on here used to be "Programmer, getting paid more than than the project Architect...") And if you have hands-on, up-to-date programmer skills, it's always easy to find a new role, even when the market tanks. As an Architect (most are hands-off paper generators), businesses will just replace you with a permie who can "talk" and do nice PowerPoint slides (seen this so many times.)

So, my cv now states "Architect/Lead Developer" for all my roles for the last 5 years. I straddle both sides of the fence, but it seems to work for me.

So yes, learn some Architecture skills (then again, I'd expect all contractors I was interviewing to be able to do some architecture, even programmers...), but skip the heart-attack inducing PM work. Unless that's what you like doing (apparently some do. )

EDIT: Finger troubles.