Search for “Java Developer” positions and you’ll find more than 8,600 postings and thousands more that require candidates to be familiar with the program. The jobs offer healthy salaries and many have excellent benefits and good growth potential.

Understandably, there’s plenty of competition for the Java jobs, too. “Our candidate market for Java development jobs is fairly tight. There are not enough candidates for the jobs we have,” says an IT staffing company which places about 15 Java developers a week.

A Matter of Skill
So, how do you land one of those hot Java development jobs? Recruiters and currently employed Java developers say it boils down to one thing: skills. Because most companies don’t train developers, they look for candidates with a few years of experience working on software development as opposed to applications. It comes down to years of experience, clients come to us for developers with niche skills. They’re looking for breadth of experience.

Ask a currently employed Java developer and you’ll get the same story. A senior web developer in California says one of his job responsibilities is conducting technical interviews on candidates. “We find that many Java developers are not trained in the skills they say they are,” he says. “They’re not professionally trained and do not follow best industry standards.”