Will your IT job survive the financial meltdown?

Coming from a position of strength

The upside is that most of these at-risk financial IT workers have specialized financial skills that will continue to be in high demand from financial companies of all sizes on the prowl to pick up this talent. Such IT people have been eagerly courted, making the supply low; the financial crisis may give second- and third-tier companies a shot at this talent pool, and perhaps for less money than in the boom times. Such highly valued skills include working at the application level on algorithmic trading programming, complex event processing specific to a trading environment, order management, derivatives trading, and evaluation applications.

Although their skills are not easily transferable to other industries, "these are valuable jobs that you're not going to see going out the door," says O'Dowd. "Business analysts won't be going anywhere, either."

O'Dowd also predicts IT workers in business infrastructure, networking, and datacenters have at least a year of job security, as finance firms work through the heavy integration process caused by the current wave of consolidation. It'll take some time before these firms figure out their needs from here on out.

But after that, all bets are off. "Once they've evaluated their ongoing needs, you might see a spike in layoffs at lower-level IT positions," O'Dowd says. Still, O'Dowd contends such IT workers shouldn't have a problem finding work -- if not in finance, then in outside industries. "IT folks in the financial services industry deal with firms that demand the greatest amount of performance, scale, volume and speed," he says, "and they have the ability to see things in worst-case, stressed scenarios -- there may be a premium for folks like that."

That premium, though, may not be as rich as in the financial sector, warns Robert Half Technology's Estes. Salaries and benefits likely won't be the same.