Changes that I saw in Software Testing

Software testing or Quality Control was not a separate department in most of the companies till the year 2000. I never knew that I can turn into a software test engineer or whether there was a career path in the testing stream while I was studying. In the early 2000, Software professional were not interested to move from development to testing. Many of the fresh graduates who joined companies during the 2000-01 time frame very forced to do testing jobs .After the 2001 recession many of the IT Companies started facing competition and quality became one of the key service differentiators. The demand for testing jobs increased during this time and companies started setting up independent testing teams. Anyone who knew how to write test cases or execute test cases got a job. Developers who were not good at coding or logic decided to give a try and many of them failed miserably in testing too. Things went on like this till 2003 after which there was a boom for automation and performance testing. Companies started investing in tools and had planned to automate everything they can. Engineers who have attended basic training on tools and with record/play back experience became automation engineers. In the year 2006 there was a focus on domain knowledge for testers, like a healthcare IT company wanted to recruit testers only with healthcare background. Since there was a huge demand for good testers this move was not very successful. Now I think I have talked enough about the past. What are companies thinking about....most of them wants testers with specialized skills like database testing, security testing, etc?  But do we have right people in our market. ?