Skills with low proficiency ratings and various combinations of high training demand and high strategic or future need are considered “high impact skills” worthy of high-priority investments. That is, they represent the areas where investments to increase employee proficiency are most likely to result in more strategic and effective use of IT in state government. Figure 1 illustrates this convergence of interests. We designated a skill as a “high impact skill investment” if it met one of the following tests:

• Low proficiency ratings + high training demand + high growth forecast + strategically important
• Low proficiency ratings + high training demand + high growth forecast
• Low proficiency ratings + high training demand + strategically important

The statewide gap analysis highlighted fourteen specific skills distributed across four of the six competency areas as shown in Table 16.

Table 16. High impact skill investments

Competency Area	Specific skills
Management	Business continuity planning IT risk assessment and management
Infrastructure	Systems security applications Identity management & directory services Encryption Intrusion detection Firewalls Wireless technologies
Web computing	Java XML/XSL Website privacy
Systems and databases
Technical support services
Management and use of information as an asset	Content management Data warehousing Records management
Legacy technologies

We performed the same analysis for each job specialty to identify the high impact skill investments that pertain to each kind of IT specialization. Very similar results were produced. None of the high impact skills for any job specialty fell in either the technical support services or legacy technologies competency areas. Conversely, every specialty includes high impact skills in the competencies of infrastructure, web computing, and use and management of information as an asset. Moreover, many of the same individual skills occur in all or nearly all specialty areas. (The full results by job specialty are shown in Table E15 in Appendix E.)

All specialties except IT managers included high impact investments in the management competency area. This is not surprising, given the generally high level of management proficiency ratings among IT managers. Among the technical specialties, operations included the fewest number of high impact skills, while the business and other technical specialties had the most. These last results probably reflect the wide range of job assignments that can be found among employees whose titles fall in these last two specialty areas. In these two groups, agency level analyses will probably reveal clearer patterns than the statewide assessment is able to provide.