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Technical skills may never die, but areas of expertise wane in importance as technology advances, forcing companies to evolve and IT staff to forsake yesterday's crafts in favour of tomorrow's must-have talents.

"There is less need for system-side knowledge. In the past, IT folks had to understand a lot about memory, drivers and address locations, and what used which interrupt, but nowadays that stuff is plug-and-chug even on many Unix systems," says Brian Jones, manager of network engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's Tech Communications Network Services unit. "I feel like all the skills I have picked up along the way are valuable and help shape my thinking and troubleshooting abilities. I don't know how to value or devalue these skills; it's like they have taken on new value now."

Industry watchers would be hard pressed to name specific IT skills as entirely dead or completely useless, but some skills are well on their way to being considered a thing of the past -- as reflected by the declining pay associated with them. As hot skills like virtualisation rise to the top of company must-have lists, high-tech talents in certain operating systems and specific vendor products fall to the bottom. Here are five high-tech skills that don't demand the pay they once did.

Plain old HTML

As companies embrace Web 2.0 technologies such AJAX, demand for skills in HTML programming are taking a back seat. According to Foote Partners, pay for skills in technologies such as Ajax and XML increased by 12.5 percent in the last six months of 2007, while IT managers say they don't see a demand for technology predecessors such as HTML. "I'm not seeing requirements for general Web 1.0 skills -- HTML programming skills," says Debbie Joy, a lead solution architect for CSC.

Legacy programming languages

Skills in programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran, PowerBuilder and more don't rate like they once did.

"Certainly the Cobol people that had a resurgence with the Y2K bug aren't in demand," says John Estes, vice president of strategic alliances of Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing consultancy. "Certain other applications such as Delphi and PowerBuilder, [which were] very big in the '90s, are no longer in demand."

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