Continued innovation in the mobile phones sector will result in an intensifying war for technology talent in 2011, according to Mark Beard, managing director at technical and IT staffing specialist Vertex Solutions.

Beard told Recruiter: “We see continued uplift in demand in 2011. Some of our bigger clients, companies in the semi conductor space and the mobile market, are coming back to the market with serious volumes.

“Some of the start-ups, where talented individuals were laid off and set up on their own, have sparked into life. This means we will be back to the old war for talent. We will have to find more imaginative ways of generating the levels of candidates that clients need.

“On the mobile side, there is a massive battle between the different operating systems. You have Symbian, which has been historically dominant. Apple has taken a significant chunk of the market. The development of Android is in the running. Nokia is about to launch its answer to Android called Meego. The first handsets are due to ship next year.

“The flavour of the month are open sourced specialists. You have gone from a very closed technology space 10 years ago, in terms of the technology  underpinning the different platforms, to it now being very open.”