By Jennifer Lonoff SchiffAccording to a recent Dice hiring survey of nearly 1,200 IT-focused hiring managers and recruiters, demand for technology professionals should continue to be strong through 2012, with "24 percent of corporate hiring managers saying they were hiring at the entry level," according to Tom Silver, senior vice president, Dice. "It's not the levels that we saw pre-recession, but similar to last year."As for where those jobs are, "It's a diverse set of industries looking for entry-level talent," he notes. Among the hot IT fields: healthcare, financial services, energy, government and mobile technology.As for what IT-related skills employers are looking for, according to a recent study by CareerBuilder and CareerRookie assessing the job prospects for the class of 2012, "companies are focusing on finding workers who have current technical skills and business acumen that can increase revenue." The most sought after students: business majors -- followed closely by computer and information science majors and engineers. Also at the head of the class: math and statistics majors and those majoring in communication technologies.In particular, employers are looking for hires who know understand software development.One Word: Programming"MIS students are realizing employers are hiring as many developers and software engineers as they can find and are very open to hiring entry-level talent," explains Fritz Eichelberger, CEO, HotSpaces.net, an IT recruiting and consulting firm based in Tampa, Florida. "MIS students who avoided any development courses, however, are finding a harder time securing an IT job compared to the CS or engineering students" who have taken courses in software development. And even though it's possible to find work if you don't have a development background, "it takes longer and the salaries are not as favorable as the development-focused students," he says."Across the board, we're looking for HTML knowledge," says Alana Peden, a marketing assistant at SpareFoot, an Austin-based tech startup that is an online marketplace for consumers to find and reserve self-storage units. "Our developers write code using PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, HTML and CSS." But that doesn't mean you have to have majored in computer science. "One of our developers was a recent grad with a biomedical engineering degree, but he could program." Another piece of advice, albeit more for current students than grads: Do an internship in the field or area you are interested in pursuing. "Before a student enters into the workforce he or she should really have some 'real world' experience through a job or internship while still in school," explains David Muir, Jr., founder, The GigSpire Program, which teaches job search skills. Work experience, even if unpaid, he says, can make a big difference.What else do recent grads need to land their dream job in IT? CIO.com asked hiring managers and IT recruiters. Following are their top tips for how to improve your chances of getting hired.Google yourself -- before a prospective employer does. Why? "I am looking for two things: you participate on the social or technical Web, and you do not have anything terribly scandalous on the Web," explains Sara Robertson, vice president, Strategic Technology, CPX Interactive, a digital adverting company. "If I find a thread on a developer forum where you are helping a newbie understand the proper way to instantiate a class, you will get a call immediately.If I find a thread on a developer forum where you are flaming a newbie for not reading the documentation, your resume is immediately in the trash." Robertson also recommends potential hires have a Twitter and/or Facebook account. "If you don't have those I will suspect something is amiss, unless you have a first-page blog where you eloquently describe all the reasons that Facebook and Twitter suck. At which point I might just want to be your best friend."Read the rest of the article at CIO.com.