For certain, IT staffing is picking up. However, don’t think things are going to return to business as usual. Post-recession IT will look very different than anything we’ve seen before. Take, for instance, the rapidly growing reliance on contractors vs. full-time IT workers. While it may be easy to dismiss this as a function of financial meltdown-era caution, we see deeper forces at work.

Reliance on contractors is an indicator of a rapid shift in both technology – particularly the cloud, social media, and mobile technology – and increasingly rapid and erratic business cycles. In tomorrow’s business world, flexibility and adaptability are everything. Companies are beginning to view IT staff in much the same way that they view the cloud itself – elastic.

As enterprise IT finally begins to catch up with consumer IT, we’re seeing a dramatic shift of the entire IT landscape that will eventually affect everyone working in the field. While the changes are innumerable, one of the first that IT pros are beginning to see is that their services will increasingly be called upon “as-needed.”

This does not mean that there is less demand for their skills – it simply means that, particularly for companies leveraging cloud-based technology, there will be times when they will require much more IT brain power than others.

One of the chief reasons companies adopt cloud-based solutions is their scalability – a characteristic which has become increasingly necessary as market demands change more rapidly. IT pros with the know how to manage these solutions are also being viewed in many cases as “scalable.”

What does this mean for Bay Area tech workers? Among many other things, it means you need to be flexible and adaptive, willing to work in multiple environments. More importantly, however, it means that the days of IT hunkering down in the basement are coming to an end – the successful technologist of 2011 and beyond will interact fluidly with other business units.

You need to be able to communicate in a businessperson’s terms the exact value of your contribution, and understand, from the user’s perspective, the impact the solution has on both the day-to-day work and the company’s bottom line.

Article first published on Examiner.com.