Understanding the skill sets required of IT personnel is a critical endeavor for both business organizations and academic or training institutions. Companies spend crucial resources training personnel, particularly new IT employees, and educational institutions must know what skills are essential in order to plan an effective curriculum. Rapid advances in technology, as well as changing IT practices, alter the importance of particular skills for IT professionals over time and therefore necessitate that frequent updates be performed. Additionally, previous studies have found mixed results as to which skills were deemed most important for IT professionals. In order to examine which skills are most critical, a taxonomy was developed from the literature that divided 42 potentially important skills into four areas: IS Core Knowledge, Technical Proficiencies, Business Expertise, and Personal Attributes. This study surveyed 153 IT field personnel from six organizations and empirically examined which skills they thought most important for entry-level IT professionals. Results found that the most important skills for new IT professionals were soft skills, specifically the personal attributes of problem-solving, critical thinking, and team skills. However, the study also found that technical skills were essential, especially database knowledge and proficiency, knowledge of programming languages, object-oriented knowledge, and web development skills. Some skills were not considered very important, particularly specialized software for applications such as decision support systems, expert systems, GIS, and ERP systems. Some skills in the area of business expertise were also rated highly, especially ethics/privacy and security issues. In comparing the four skill areas, the study found that each area was significantly different than the other three in terms of importance, in this order: personal attributes, business expertise, IS core knowledge items, and proficiencies. The study also found some significant differences in the importance of some skills depending on the respondent's age, gender, years in IT field, and management level. Of particular note, there was a significant difference in importance between male and female respondents for fourteen of the 42 skills in this study, particularly in proficiencies (females considered all but one of these skills more important than males), suggesting a gender effect. These results support previous studies that suggest nontechnical skills to be extremely important. But it differed from some studies in confirming that technical skills are also important for new IT hires, and which skills were most essential. This study suggests that academic programs should focus on enhancing these areas, concentrating on soft skills and those more traditional areas of MIS, including databases, programming languages, and web skills. (Contains 8 tables.)