Data Center Hiring Boom for 2011?

If the first three weeks of the year are any indication, 2011 may be a big year for data center hiring.  There's been a strong surge in job postings on the Data Center Job Board, which currently features 29 job listings.

The companies that are hiring span the breadth of the industry, including Amazon, Savvis Communications,  DuPont Fabros, Latisys, Sabey Data Centers, Emerson Network Power, Johnson Controls, Geist, Parsons, Tate Access Floors, Lunarpages, Firehost, Norlinx, 3tSystems and Dartmouth College. A number of these companies are posting two and three jobs at a time.

What's unusual about this? Historically it's been unusual to see more than 10 jobs at a time listed on our job board.  It could be that the industry is simply recognizing that the Data Center Job Board is a great value (which it is). What about other job listing services?

While few have seen the spike we've had on our DCK board, the trend is clearly higher. Here's a look at the trends at Indeed.com for data center job listings.

And here's the steeper upward trend for jobs for the term "cloud computing," which is ranked ninth among hot job trends ("HTML5" and "mobile apps" are the leaders).