Bangalore: A recent Global Salary Survey compiled by international recruitment consultancy Robert Walters says that organizations across all industries will face a major shortage of IT professionals in 2011 and as a result, they will be forced to offer higher salaries to secure top talent. If IT is the keyword of the economy, the most wanted people are certainly skilled IT professionals. But the increasing shortage of skilled talent, as well as an enormous demand for them has triggered a talent war with higher salaries and retention problems. As per a report published in the Wall Street Journal, the short-supply of available engineers specialising in mobile apps development is becoming a key log jam for companies looking to exploit the fast growth in smartphones and apps. Hence, both large companies and fast-growing start-ups are left with no options but to increase wages, retrain software engineers, outsource work to third-party developers and set up offshore development labs to meet demand. According to market research firm Gartner, mobile applications have boomed, and revenue from Apple's App Store, Google's Android Market and other stores where mobile applications are sold to nearly triple to $15 billion this year. In the last year, said the report, the number of online job listings with the keyword "iPhone" in the text has nearly tripled, while the number with "Android" has more than quadrupled, according to listings search engine Indeed Inc. Because of this mismatch between supply and demand, many companies have to retrain software engineers in the art of mobile development. It has also put upward pressure on wages. According to an October survey by tech job board Dice.com, about 31 percent of companies reported that average pay among mobile software designers and engineers increased at a higher rate than normal, mostly because of heightening competition for talent. Not only mobile application development, this IT skill famine is visible among newer programming language professionals also. According to experts, colleges rarely teach the newer programming languages like PHP, Ruby and Python, which have become more popular at young Web companies than older ones like Java. In present time when these new programming languages dominate all most all the software used in various devices like smartphones and tablets, the dearth of skilled professionals in this area makes a huge impact on the working of the companies associated with it. The shortage of talent is there in the area of networking as well. The supply of professionals with the technical expertise to manage sophisticated networks has been diminishing across all global theatres. Analysts said that companies are already experiencing a lack of skilled network engineers, and without a concerted effort to address this issue, the number will continue to dwindle. Cisco has taken an important step in its ongoing efforts to accelerate the development of technical talent across the globe with two new major initiatives - Cisco Live: The Cisco Learning Network and three new Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) concentrations. Similar to this Cisco's effort, a lot more are required to address the issue of skill shortage.