So when I talked about the importance of retention the other day, I didn't really take a look at what skillsets are most valuable to hold on to. Retention, in an environment where IT is projected to continue to shed jobs (Hackett estimates that 3.6 million backoffice jobs will be eliminated by 2014, extending the IT productivity streak that finally emerged in the shambles of the dot-com implosion) overall, is mostly about keeping experience on board. Technical skills, in that environment, will continue to be an available surplus from which CIOs can shop as needed. But as a facet of those trends that are driving the job losses, aren't technical skills themselves increasingly unimportant?

Forrester's Mark Cecere has a short post up covering the shifting skill sets supporting IT, noting that recent moves toward social-based, Enterprise 2.0, and cloud-based systems require different skills than more traditional IT systems. What Cecere doesn't note is that many of these specific skills aren't really technology skills at all, but business skills.

IT staff with business skills are rare, and will probably remain rare; the crossovers are few and many of the paths that lead to IT skills expertise do not encourage the simultaneous development of business skills like communications, accounting, coordination, and public speaking. So; is it time to start looking to the business side of the house for IT job candidates, and expecting to have to train them on the technical aspects in exchange for the ready-made business skills? Or is it still easier to find someone with technical chops and send them to communication seminars until they can communicate with users using plain English?