Liz Brady: It depends on whether you're hiring or looking for a job! The demand for quality IT talent is booming, while the talent pipeline is more constrained than ever. CIOs are finding it very difficult to recruit top talent because of a culmination of factors: decreased enrolment in technology majors; the impending retirement of a large population of IT workers; and a general misperception of the IT career as a dead-end path, subject to eventual outsourcing.

What CIOs and organizations find alarming about a weak pipeline is that it creates a shortage of crucial midlevel talent ready for future IT leadership roles. But in the short term, they have an open headcount (even with low attrition rates) and a struggle to find quality talent with the right amount of experience and the critical skills they need to be a strategic driver for the company.

David Foote: The convergence of business and IT hasn't really happened as anticipated, with the exception of intensely competitive customer-driven industries such as gaming and hospitality. Still, the most exciting IT jobs in 2008 will be so-called IT/business hybrid roles that combine functional area and/or vertical business knowledge and specific process and operations acumen with a wide range of technical skills.

It will be a watershed year for IT professionals examining their long-range career ambitions and deciding once and for all, Do I have what it takes to be this type of person? Too many have been avoiding this, but employers have become desperate for such talent and in 2008 will force the decision like never before. Jim Lanzalotto: The hiring outlook for 2008 is a little like Goldilocks and the three bears. Some markets will stay hot, including functional and technical consultants, project managers and security experts. Others will be lukewarm, such as Web development, networking and data administration. And still others will be too cold, including help desk and tech support roles.

CIO.com: Which IT jobs will be the hottest — and hardest — for the CIO to fill next year?

Katherine Spencer Lee: Networking and end-user support are two traditional job categories experiencing significant growth within IT departments. In addition, there are talent shortages in a number of specialties, such as applications and Web development and database management.

Offering competitive compensation is crucial for recruiting candidates with experience in these and other high-demand specialties. Sign-on and annual bonuses, equity incentives, professional development programs and other perks also are becoming more common.

There also is strong demand for messaging administrators — the air traffic controllers of IT. They manage the vast amount of information passed among e-mail systems, corporate networks and, increasingly, handheld devices like BlackBerrys.