Will be interesting to see what others have to say.

Re: "business analyst type resources who understand information architecture and best practices around SharePoint site or community design"...don't forget to post positions with both national associations such as Society of Technical Communication (www.stc.org). This professional association is filled with people who understand business requirements, well architected information, repurposing content, using metadata to drive different views of the same data set, and may have had experience being Site Administrators or other relevant SharePoint experience, along with a comfort level with HTML, XML, and CSS. Personally, as a Sr. Techincal Content Specialist, I have that skill set and would love to be a BA that helped orgs get their SP act together in conjunction with their operational processes (i.e., position them for SP workflow). [grin] However, the positions I frequently see [Mpls, MN] only consider the Visual Studio coding/customization side of things.

I've heard similar stories from sponsors of the San Antonio SharePoint User Group. The consistent comment seems to be that everyone is racing to keep up since the release of SharePoint 2007 took off. It's basically supply and demand. There just aren't enough expereinced resources available yet because the platform is so new.
Microsoft is doing great with the certification tracks as I've experienced through the Microsoft Certified Master in SharePoint. However, there is certainly a lot of opportunity for training for partners. I'm interested to hear how others are approaching this, too.

Looks like this discussion fizzled a little. However, I will see if I can "poke" it & get it going because I think it is an interesting topic.

I myself have had this discussion before & here are my bullet points (which are simply my personal opinions based on my experience and what I have heard from respected cohorts).

* The large uptick in the use of SharePoint is creating a shortage to some degree (as Mr. Resing states)
* There is a lack of willingness to train staff by organizations, thus creating a lack of knowledge internally and increasing demand (adding to the first bullet)
* There is a differing set of opinions in the technical community regarding the required skills for SharePoint related work. Most developer's feel they can do anything, while some feel that SharePoint has nuance's that require additional learning & the willingness to learn how things work best for SharePoint rather than how they work in .NET. (arguments follow this statement)
* There is a big gap in the understanding of what staffing or skills are needed for successful SharePoint implementations and on-going use and enhancement. Recommendations in this area also vary greatly, often based on the opinions of the recommender and their stance on the earlier bullet items.
The summary of this bullet should be - the business doesn't really know what they are looking for in SharePoint resources. Often they advertise for a developer when they need something else, or visa-versa.

The big push as I see it is that companies need three distinct set of resources - the technical architects who can appropriately scale the stack, business analyst who can understand current/future needs of both their business and of the platform, and support personnel who have enough knowledge not to much up what the other two skill sets just implemented :).

In our company, we rolled out SP 2010 to our Intranet last year - very very early. The number of available, qualified system integrators (beyond Microsoft themselves) was close to zero.

Now that we are beyond our first implementation, we are utilizing microsoft certified partners who absolutely are qualified to enable additional functionality at a price that doesn't break the bank.

The bigger issue in my mind is that some companies seem to no longer invest in their own IT staffs to learn the platform appropriately and thus the huge reliance on system integrators. Many corporate IT folks I know have to scavage for training resources (and thank gawd they exist on the internet). I could understand that lack of return on investment if SharePoint was not a long-term strategy for a company. Sadly, that's not what I'm hearing and seeing.