Nearly 29 percent of the 353 IT executives who were polled in Computerworld’s annual Forecast survey said they plan to increase IT staffing through next summer. (That’s up from 23% in the 2010 survey and 20% in the 2009 survey.)

Here are the skills that the IT executives say they will be hiring for:

1. Programming and Application Development–61% plan to hire for this skill in the next 12 months, up from 44% in the 2010 survey. This covers the gamut from website development to upgrading internal systems and meeting the needs of mobile users.
2. Project Management (but with a twist)– The twist is that they’re not going to just be looking for people who can oversee and monitor projects. They also want people who can identify users’ needs and translate them for the IT staffers-the increasingly popular business analysts.
3. Help Desk/Technical Support–Mobile operating systems have added a new dimension to help desk and tech support.
4. Networking-This demand is being fueled partially by virtualization and cloud computing projects. The survey also revealed that execs will be looking for people with VMware and Citrix experience.
5. Business Intelligence-Computerworld interprets this uptick to a focus shift in many companies,  from cost savings to investing in technology. That will be nice if it pans out that way.
6. Data Center-Virtualization and the Cloud could also be behind the increased need for IT professionals with backgrounds in data center operations and systems integration.
7. Web 2.0-Tech skills centered around social media will be in demand, with .Net, AJAX and PHP as key back-end skills, with HTML, XML, CSS, Flash and Javascript, among others, on the front end.
8. Security-Although down from 32 percent in the 2010 survey, security stays a top concern of IT executives.
9. Telecommunications-The survey indicates a demand for people with IP telephony skills, and for those familiar with Cisco IPCC call center systems.

So we are over a month into 2012 and already we’ve overdosed on the “Top tech trends for 2012″ lists. It is vital to have a view of the future, especially in technology, however lists suggest that they are about future trends, but we are now increasingly likely to see a recycled style of what’s already happened. It therefore comes as no surprise that as such, it’s more about this year’s followers than leaders.

The “next big thing” appears to be launched on an almost daily basis. However, only a small minority actually get to become even a medium-sized “thing”. It seems that a growing amount of those consumer tech start-ups have a strategy based upon the “ones to watch” articles. Trends such as, mobile payments, syncs with the cloud, social and intellectual networking are all banded about in IT strategy talks. The problem is once the product is launched, users find it far too complicated. It makes them go “oooooh” and “aaaahhh” once, but it will never been used again.

So based on this information, if you feel like making a easy money what business should you launch in 2012?

It’s all about the “second-screen experience”. This is integrated for you across Facebook and Twitter, so your connections can effortlessly” know your every move. It will be hyper-local, offering you access to deals and functions for you to pay for things through it – most likely  using Facebook Credits and other forms of social currency. Like some other sites it will  crunch data collected above and suggest things you’ll like or where you will save you money.

But,in hindsight it doesn’t quite work like that- yet. Even the greatest new tech businesses don’t following the latest big trends. Businesses are aware that if the new feature and trend offers no true value to the alternative, why bother to switch?

The most innovative ideas will come from someone moving away from the herd, piecing together seemingly unrelated bits of information to create a very simple yet powerful way of solving issues we all suffer with. We will then all think why how obvious, why hadn’t we thought of that, they’ll make a small fortune, and we can all then talk about it in 2013’s latest and greatest!