This article is brought to you by Prosum Technology Services, one of the fasted growing IT staffing & consulting companies in Southern California.

IT staffing agencies have seen an increase in the demand for tech professionals during the last three years. In 2013, IT jobs are expected to grow in the U.S. by up to 33 percent. Technology drives so much of the business world – from enhancing productivity to boosting the bottom line – it’s no wonder companies are investing more in quality IT talent.

The following is a look at the top skills information technology leaders seek in 2013:

1. Virtualization

Interaction with virtual resources is growing as the tech world’s physical platforms increasingly fall short. Serving as the fresh face of optimization, virtualization skills are a must-have for an IT professional. In the IT staffing world, the demand for experience with this skill set will grow by up to 24 percent.

2. Information Security

The need tokeep information secure will never go away. As security technologies advance, so will hackers. IT staffing agencies look for professionals who stay on top of the latest threats; security systems and measures; firewall deployments; threat-detection tools; and encryption technologies.  

3. Mobile Development

In a time when there’s a rush to make an app for almost everything, the demand for mobile developers will grow by up to 19 percent. IT staffing companies seek pros who know how to navigate the X Code, iOS and Objective C languages.

4. Business Intelligence (BI)

With anexpected growth of 26 percent, companies are in need of IT professionals who can keep them up to speed with the latest technologies that promote growth. A person with experience and knowledge of business intelligence helps ensure the company stays a step head of the competition. IT experts with business how-to and a background in mathematics and statistics are in high demand.

5. Extract, Transform and Load (ETL)

Data isworth its figurative weight in gold, and the ability to read and extract data, transform it to meet internal needs and load it into a target database is essential. As the amount of data companies handle continues to grow, so will the need to upgrade old databases. As businesses presently seek those with ETL skills, IT staffing groups expect the demand for this specialization to grow throughout the decade. 

As long a scomputers and mobile technologies exist, so will the need for IT professionals. The technology research group Gartner expects worldwide IT spending to reach $3.7 trillion by the end of 2013. They attribute this to big data, which will create as many as 4.4 million jobs by 2015. As the talent pool shrinks and the need for specialized skills rises, IT pros can expect their salaries to go up by 9 percent.