The Top 10 Tech Skills?

Reading a recent issue of NETWORKWORLD, I was intigued by an article called "Does a Computer Science Degree Matter Anymore?" In a nutshell, their conclusion was "it depends". Evidently, there are some people that feel that a lack of solid computer science grads could damage America's competitiveness in technical innovation, but, on the other hand, most of the time when companies hire techies, they are looking for specific skills rather than a degree. So, as a side article they included what they think are the current "Top 10 Tech Skills".

I am, by nature, a skeptic, and as one of my professors liked to say, quoting Mark Twain, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." So, I don't accept such a list as given by NETWORKWORLD or any other "expert source" on face value.

Their numero uno skill is "Business Process Modeling". They say that in the past year pay for these skills are up 10.3%. That's great, but how many people does this affect? Can you actually get one of these jobs? Searching indeed.com for BPM jobs near my zip code, I found a whopping 10 jobs. Woo hoo! By contrast, a search on java turned up 334 jobs and a search for .NET turned up 407. So, here is their complete list with my addition of number of jobs near my zip code using some related job searches (some terms are too broad to search on, such as "database"). Also, note that the numbers I list are the number of jobs for which indeed.com could determine some salary estimate.

1. BPM
"BPM": 10 jobs
"business process modeling": 6 jobs
2. Database
"Microsoft SQL Server": 42 jobs
"Oracle Developer Suite": 0 jobs
"Oracle DBA": 10 jobs
"DBA": 78 jobs
3. Messaging/Communications
"VoIP": 49 jobs
4. IT Architecture
"software architect": 101 jobs
5. IT Security
"it security": 25 jobs
"computer security": 7 jobs
"security analyst": 7 jobs
6. Project Management
"software project manager": 467 jobs
7. Data Mining
"Data Mining": 22 jobs
8. Web Development
"Web Developer": 36 jobs
"Web 2.0": 6 jobs
9. IT Optimization
"IT Optimization": 0 jobs
"virtualization": 27 jobs
"cloud computing": 0 jobs
10. Networking
"cisco certified": 11 jobs
"network engineer": 38 jobs

So, by what standards are these the top 10 skills if their are so few actual jobs in some of these areas? Project managers seem to be in high demand, but I think it would be debatable whether or not this even belongs in a list of "tech skills".

By contrast:
"java": 334 jobs
"j2ee": 108 jobs
"hibernate spring": 51 jobs
"java swing": 19 jobs
".NET": 407 jobs
"c#": 179 jobs
"asp.net": 131 jobs
"visual basic": 83 jobs
"c++": 194 jobs
"cobol": 45 jobs! (there are more jobs for Cobol than for BPM!)
"fortran": 75 jobs!
"groovy": 1 job

Pay is a whole separate issue. Salaries for BPM are going up while salaries for Cobol have gone down since last year. But if you can't even get a job with your skill, what's the point?