November, 2009

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Right-Brain Skills for 21st Century Jobs

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

In previous blogs, I’ve written extensively of the needs for tomorrow’s employees to combine quantitative and qualitative skills (articles including Business Analytics as a High-Value Career Opportunity) and the needs to become an interdisciplinary “T-shaped” generalist, rather than a narrowly-focused specialist. (IBM’s Role in Creating Tomorrow’s Workforce among other articles).

There is absolutely no question that the high-value white-collar jobs of the future will require a boarder range of increasingly deep knowledge and left-brained analytical skills. This is a given. But while deep knowledge and strong, increasingly interdisciplinary analytical skills will be a necessary for capturing tomorrow’s jobs, they may not be sufficient to keep these jobs. They certainly won’t be sufficient to command the world-class compensation, security or prestige associated with the type of world-class skills that will be required to succeed in a world in which:

  • Increasingly sophisticated IT capabilities automate (or at least significantly reduce) the amount of relatively routine, “lightly analytic” labor that is currently associated with many business processes; and
  • The rapidly growing number and expanding skills base of hundreds of millions of low-cost developing country white-collar workers (combined with ever higher-speed networks and improved IT-enabled communications and collaboration capabilities) who are capable of performing the type of increasingly sophisticated tasks that have been traditionally reserved for developed country workers.

Just what are the additional requirements for capturing and retaining the high-value jobs of tomorrow? As Tom Friedman explained in his October 22nd New York Times editorial “The New Untouchables”, the experiences of the current recession may provide some important lessons for the future. As Friedman explains, the people who are receiving pink slips during the current recession are “the average practitioners”—those people who perform routine tasks and those that wait for work to be handed to them.

Those who are too valuable to layoff—those that Friedman calls “the new untouchables” are “those with the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work”. These people have the “imagination….to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies.”

I totally agree with Friedman. Companies, and virtually every other type of organization, need—and will do all in their power to retain—people with:

  • The imagination to identify new opportunities;
  • The initiative and the skills to build compelling business cases around them; and
  • The interpersonal and communication skills required to sell these ideas.

It is true. A small percentage of people—those with truly exceptional analytical skills and/or with exceptional understanding of  particularly important areas—will continue to be sought after, retained and rewarded for their analytical skills alone. The vast majority of us, however, need more. They need varying combinations of the type of right-brained skills that Daniel Pink, in his 2006 book, “A Whole New Mind” (see his blog at http://www.danpink.com/), broadly categorizes as:

  • High concept, “the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, … to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new;” and
  • High touch, “the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, … and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.”

All employees must certainly have the type of analytical skills and intellectual content that is required of every job. But those who hope to make themselves indispensible to their employers must have much more. They must be capable of coming up with unique, breakthrough ideas and express these ideas in a way that will be compelling to and elicit the desired responses from others.

Easy to say, but awfully tough to do. Few people possess sufficient levels of all three—analytical, conceptual and empathic—skill sets. Fewer still can combine them in just the right way, at the right time.

The big question, however, is how our society can best teach these skills and the ways to most effectively apply them. In theory, it’s much easier to teach analytic skills than it is to teach conceptual or empathic skills. We have certainly had much more experience in doing so. But given our educational system’s very scattered record at teaching even basic analytic skills, can we even expect them to play a role in teaching the other two? Where else will these skills come from? From family? Peers? Employers?

And if we don’t know how to teach these skills, how will we begin teaching another trait that may prove to be even more important in ensuring lifetime career success in an increasingly volatile, unpredictable world? How will we teach the type of adaptability that will be required to continually reinvent oneself to meet the demands of conditions we cannot even ponder, or jobs that we cannot yet define?

Although schools, family, peers and employers must all play some role in teaching these increasingly critical skills, there is no escaping the uncomfortable truth. Every individual must assume greater responsibility for defining their own skills requirements and for ensuring that they develop these skills.

Preparing for Careers in Cloud Computing and Technical Analytics

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

My last blog, Business Analytics as a High-Value Career Opportunity, examined the growth and career opportunities inherent in using analytics to improve business functions and processes. However, analytics applications—and the increasingly powerful tools that enable them—are also creating incredible new opportunities for graduates in a broad range of technical disciplines.

Two leading technology vendors, IBM and Google, in cooperation with a government agency, have taken an important step in helping students prepare for careers in these promising new fields. Not coincidentally, this work will help these vendors enhance the IT architectures, create the application development skills and build a base of developers that will instrumental in creating new-generation computing infrastructures and applications on which these vendors hope to build their own futures.

Building the Foundation for Large-Scale Internet Computing

There is nothing new about large-scale technical computing. Scientists and engineers have long used the world’s most powerful supercomputers to perform complex calculations on huge data sets—the type of computations required to model and visualize complex interactions and simulate outcomes.

What is new is that a growing portion of this work is migrating from huge, expensive and traditionally proprietary supercomputers and software, to distributed, cloud-based architectures that consist of clusters of hundreds or thousands of standard PCs, connected through open standard interfaces, and applications developed with open source tools.

In October 2007, IBM and Google partnered to create the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative, which provided several universities with access to a large cluster running the Hadoop open source distributed computing platform. The companies provided the required hardware, software and services and recruited six leading computer science research organization (University of Washington, Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, Stanford, U of C Berkeley and University of Maryland) to participate in a pilot program. Then, in February 2008, IBM and Google partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide grants to academic researchers to explore large-data architectural issues and create applications that could take advantage of this infrastructure.

Technical Analytics Enablement

As of October 2009, the NSF had awarded $5 million in grants to 14 universities for various research projects.. Most of these projects have a dual goal of:

  1. Improving computer science students’ knowledge of highly parallel computing practices; and of
  2. Spurring research into specific aspects of large-scale, data-intensive cloud cluster architectures and application development.

The first award, to the University of Washington, has the broadest, most foundational goal. It is intended to help jumpstart the widespread teaching of large-scale cluster computing to large numbers of computer science and software engineering teachers and students across multiple undergraduate universities. It is creating a 2.5 day workshop that provides course material and curricular support that professors at undergraduate universities around the world can use to develop their own courses.

Most awards, however, are intended to fund advanced research into specific particularly knotty problems that must be addressed for cloud to become a ubiquitous platform. A number of the initial grants focus on search—the primary horizontal application of cloud technology and the foundation of Google’s market position. For example, Carnegie-Mellon, University of California-Santa Barbara and University of Massachusetts-Amherst were each awarded NSF grants for developing more efficient methods of searching and managing queries across the Web. University of California-Irvine received one for research intended to improve the efficiency and accuracy of fuzzy search queries on large text repositories.

A number of awards were focused on issues that underlie a broad range of high-performance, technical computing problems. Examples include grants to:

  • MIT, Yale and University of Wisconsin-Madison for studies of tradeoffs associated with using different approaches for analyzing and extracting information from very large collections of data across large-scale clusters of parallel computers; and
  • University of California-San Diego for improving the performance of dynamic provisioning of data-intensive applications.

But while most grants focused on broad, infrastructure-related issues, a few delved directly into specific scientific analytic applications. For example:

  • One of the University of Washington’s three projects focuses on astrophysics, particularly the analysis of astronomical images, space-time overlaps and the simulation of collisions of galaxies;
  • University of Washington and University of Utah each won grants for projects that will allow ad hoc, longitudinal query and visualization of massive ocean simulation results at interactive speeds;
  • University of Maryland-College Park is conducting a project to develop parallel algorithms for analyzing DNA sequencing; and
  • University of California-San Diego’s aforementioned dynamic provisioning research will include a focus on protein matching in bioinformatics.

Helping Students—Helping Themselves

The IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative, as mentioned, has an immediate objective of stimulating research into areas that will be instrumental in establishing cloud as a ubiquitous computing platform. A few are intended to promote research into specific technical disciplines—some of which may have direct commercial application, others not.

But regardless of the immediate commercial opportunities, many of these projects will serve as platforms for subsequent research by hundreds of other universities and corporate research labs. Research findings, for example, will be published in scientific journals, and be disseminated though conferences and by graduates who move to other universities and into the private sector. Some of the projects will result directly in usable products, such as code that will be available under open source licenses.

All of these projects, however, address another of the supporting vendors’ longer-term goals—to create a generation of students that understand the value and application, and will help drive the adoption of cloud-based computing.

Some of these students—particularly those in disciplines such as computer science and software engineering—are training to become the systems and application architects of tomorrow. IBM and Google will work with professors to identify the most promising of these students, offer them scholarships and internships, and attempt to recruit them into their organizations. (See my November 11 blog and report on IBM’s Academic Initiative (IBM’s Role in Creating Tomorrow’s Workforce) to understand how such efforts fit into that vendor’s broad employee development strategy.)

But only a small percentage of those students who benefit from the Cloud Computing University Initiative efforts will end up working for IBM or Google. Many are likely to end up in working for IT organizations or for other vendors—including competitors of IBM and Google. Meanwhile, students who learn to apply parallel computing tools to other disciplines, such as astrophysics, biochemistry or environmental studies, are likely to apply these techniques to their own private and public sector careers.

All of these graduates, however, can provide at least indirect benefits to the founding vendors. Those who work in customer IT departments will help drive demand for cloud-based solutions. Even those who join competitors have the potential of helping to expand the overall cloud market.

In the end, however, the founding vendors, and all private and public sector participants in all types of technical research, are likely to gain the greatest value from those students in non-IT-related technical disciplines—those that learn to apply high-performance, cloud-based computing clusters to drive innovation in their own fields. Their work, combined with the expansion of the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative into other academic departments—everything from finance and marketing, though metallurgy and nanotechnology, to architecture and urban planning–will spur new applications, and new innovation in all types of fields.

Although not all this work will directly benefit IBM or Google, it will certainly help to jumpstart the cloud computing market. This will not only provide indirect benefits to the two vendors, it will also create new career opportunities for thousands of IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative graduates plus millions of others that end up in new jobs that will be created by these graduates’ innovations

Business Analytics as a High-Value Career Opportunity

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

A number of my previous blogs have discussed the importance of quantitative skills in preparing for the jobs of the 21st century. These skills are becoming increasingly critical for all types of jobs in all types of industries. Some industries (such as banking and insurance) and job categories (including accounting, finance and engineering) are almost inherently quantitative.

However, a growing number of jobs—both blue collar and white collar—in virtually every industry increasingly require quantitative skills. This is true whether you are looking for a job in:

  • A marketing department, where you will be increasingly required to interpret customer preferences and trends from vast quantities of real-time point-of-sales data or Internet usage patterns;
  • Government or white-collar law enforcement, such as in identifying hidden patterns to detect increasingly sophisticated fraudulent schemes;
  • A research laboratory, where you are trying to discover the next blockbuster drug or design a green building; or on a
  • Manufacturing plant floor, where employees must continually monitor, interpret and determine how to respond to feedback from increasingly automated, computer-controlled facilities and processes.

While all type of jobs will increasingly require quantitative skills, the highest value, most differentiated use of these skills will be in applying increasingly sophisticated analytics and techniques in a way that will bring new insight to, and in a few cases, totally transform, your particular field. (See, for example, Merv Adrian’s Business Intelligence blog for up-to-date discussions of opportunities and trend. 

Business Analytics Goes Mainstream

Business analytics offer some of the most numerous and diverse of all analytics opportunities for graduates with the requisite skills.

After all, while all companies are already swamped with data, we “ain’t seen nothing yet”. The Internet is spawning as much new data every year as the world has compiled cumulatively, from the dawn of numbers to the invention of computers. Companies are capturing instant information from virtually every consumer transaction and are in the process of “instrumenting” (using sensors to continually capture real-time information from) virtually every type of device in the physical world. Unfortunately, most of this data remains unused and even when executives want to use it, they find the data to be incomplete, inconsistent, incomprehensible or otherwise suspect.

Not surprisingly, vendors from virtually every segment of the IT industry are rushing to help—launching data warehousing solutions, information analysis applications and consulting and outsourcing service offerings.

IBM, for one, has been linking mathematicians and scientists from the company’s research organization with Business Consulting Services consultants for years in an effort to help clients address particularly gnarly problems. It dramatically expanded its own analytics software offerings through acquisitions of companies including Cognos and SSPS. In April 2009, it announced the creation of a new 4,000+ consultant service line—Business Analytics and Optimization Services. This group will use advanced, real-time analytics to help clients across 17 different industries (especially financial services, distribution, industrial, communications and public sector) help clients across 17 different industries (especially financial services, distribution, industrial, communications and public sector) address analytical needs across all business functions (marketing, finance, supply chain, HR, etc.) to drive better, more predictive business decisions and to transform business processes and business models.

IBM is hardly alone among IT vendors in dramatically expanding its business analytics offerings and capabilities. Over the last year, for example:

  • Hewlett-Packard commercialized the data warehousing technologies it inherited from its acquisition of Compaq and combined it with enhanced business intelligence consulting services to create its new Business Intelligence software unit.
  • IT software leaders, including SAP and Oracle, which already had significant analytics capabilities, complemented previous major analytics software acquisitions (Business Objects and Hyperion respectively) with more specialized analytics acquisitions and expanded consulting capabilities.
  • Analytics specialists, such as SAS Institute and a number of smaller firms, including KXEN and Angoss, are being increasingly rumored as acquisition targets of larger firms looking to enhance their own analytics bona fides.

Meanwhile, independent systems integrators, such as Accenture, CSC, Deloitte and Capgemini, are expanding their own analytics services offerings and a growing number of corporations across all industries are developing dedicated analytics staffs and incorporating deeper analytics capabilities across current business units.

Skills Requirements

The dramatic growth in business analytics is creating all types of new career opportunities. For example, it will require highly qualified software architects and developers to create the tools to analyze vast quantities of data and the systems architects to create the increasingly cloud-based systems that will be required to process it.

More importantly, it will require huge numbers of people who understand the type of information that companies will need from the analytics applications and how to capture, present and apply this information to the needs of the business. This requires people with skills in areas including:

  1. Information strategy, as to define a company’s information agenda and determine the type of data that will be required;
  2. Enterprise information integration, to ensure the integrity of information used in data warehouses and analytics applications;
  3. Business performance management, to determine the most effective way to present information to users;
  4. Enterprise content management, to integrate data and workflow into information management strategies;
  5. Advanced analytics, to ensure that information can be used in a way that will allow a company to predict and proactively address needs in real time; and
  6. Business process optimization and transformation, to reinvent processes in a way that will allow the organization to quickly, effectively and efficiently respond to changes and make mid-course corrections.

Most importantly, it will require that virtually every employee, in any function and in any type of organization, must understand the value of analytics to their company, the type of information that will allow them to better perform their jobs, and how to gain access to and make the most effective use of this information.

Preparing for “Hysteresis” *

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

(*from the Greek “husteros”, which means “late”)

I thought that I fully appreciated the nation’s employment crisis. My thirty year career in the IT industry gave me a unique perspective on the types of skills that are required to drive and market innovation in next-generation industries, how new technologies continually change skills requirements, and the rapid growth in emerging country skills. I saw how these trends, particularly when combined with complementary trends—such as demographics, educational patterns and political pressures—were fundamentally transforming the types of skills that would be required for success in tomorrow’s technology-based, global knowledge economy.

Then came the Great Recession. As if the disconnect between the future needs of the U.S., and current directions wasn’t already troubling enough, the recession made things much worse. Although the nation’s skills gap continues to worsen, the country no longer has the “luxury” of focusing on the skills that would be required for tomorrow’s jobs or the requirements for developing a new-age, globally competitive economy. We must now focus on the requirements for getting people back to work today. And we must do so in an economy in which:

  • Many traditional industry segments and jobs, such as in the automotive, financial services and retail sectors, will never return;
  • Consumers will be forced to reduce spending due to a combination of unemployment, falling wages and shrunken portfolio and home values;
  • All types of spending and investments will be severely retrained by the needs for families, financial institutions, corporations and governments to “de-leverage”; and
  • Big chunks of two generations—Baby Boomers and Millennials—may be all but locked out of the market for meaningful jobs. (see my 8/3/09 blog, Is the Great Recession Creating Two Lost U.S. Generations?

This explosive combination of trends (technology, globalization, demographics, education and the impact that the Great Recession would have on long-term employment opportunities) that prompted me to focus my research and launch my blog on the challenges and requirements for developing sustainable, high-value careers in the 21st century.

But, as well as I thought I understood the new career challenges, a recent article made me realize that even I–who has continually emphasized the profound structural shifts facing the U.S. employment market–may have underestimated the real magnitude of these challenges. This article, written by Joshua Cooper Ramos, managing director of Kissinger Associates for Time Magazine, is “Jobless in America: Is Double-Digit Unemployment Here to Stay?”

The article examines, and generally validates an off-text remark made by Lawrence Summers (who was a Nobel Prize-winning employment theory economist before becoming director of Obama’s National Economic Council) at a July 2009 conference sponsored by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

As Summers discussed, the U.S. economy appears to have passed through an inflection point. Traditional economic models failed to anticipate the pace or magnitude of recent job losses and nobody really knows what will be required to get us back to acceptable levels of unemployment—or even if we will even will be able to get back to acceptable levels. The country has already lost nearly 7 million jobs—the total number of jobs that have been created in the entire decade since 1999—and many economists expect it to take at least five years before this number of jobs will be recovered. (And this does not even begin to account for the 100,000 new jobs that must be created each month to compensate for new job entrants or the 11 million additional people that are currently underemployed, either working fewer hours than they would like or are too discourages to even look for work.)

Summers, it seems, anticipated and coined a term for this type of structural dislocation back in 1986. He called it “hysteresis”—what happens when something snaps in such a way that it can never be put back together—like a light bulb which has been shattered by being dropped on the floor.

Traditional job creation measures cannot rally address these problems. Sure, the government can create temporary jobs—at least until political pressure and the ballooning budget deficit prevent it from funding these make-work jobs. New jobs, such as those in retail and hospitality may fund minimum lifestyles, but won’t create the types of skills required for tomorrow’s high-value jobs. Even growth segments, like nursing and education, will do little or nothing to ensure global competitiveness or generate the foreign exchange required to pay for the nation’s habits.

We already understand many of the types of jobs that will not return to the U.S. as the economy improves, but what type jobs that will take their place? Biotech, GreenTech, NanoTech? Perhaps, someday, but nobody knows for sure.

What should students and disaffected workers do in the interim? I hate to repeat myself, but I will stick with the recommendations I made in two recent blogs:

An Elusive Hope for “H-1B Inaction”

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

The H1-B visa program, which grants temporary visas for educated, foreign workers in “specialized occupations” to enter the U.S., has long been a political lightening rod. Proponents claim that the program is absolutely required as a means of gaining access to technical skills that are in short supply in the U.S. Opponents, by contrast, contend that it takes jobs away from U.S. citizens and allows corporations to replace high-wage U.S. workers with lower-paid foreigners.

Although vendors have continually pressed for the government to lift the 65,000 visa annual quota for such visas, the political winds—especially during the recession—have been blowing in exactly the opposite direction. Congress, for example, placed restrictions on bailout recipients’ hiring of foreign workers and Senators Grassley and Durbin have introduced legislation that would make it more difficult for all firms to bring workers in under this program. And this does not even begin to consider the dozens of more subtle, less institutionalized “barriers” to the program that Vivek Wahdwa discusses so passionately in his many studies and articles.

Encouraging Signs

Although I do see some opportunities for abuse, I believe that the program, on balance, is not only positive for the U.S., it is essential. We simply are not graduating sufficient numbers of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) professionals from our universities. Moreover, as I have discussed in previous blogs, a rapidly growing percentage of these undergraduate students—and the majority of STEM graduate students—are citizens of other countries (especially India and China).

Our universities need foreign students to fill their classrooms and pay for the professors and facilities that keep our programs ahead of those of other countries. U.S. businesses, meanwhile, need these skills if they are to remain competitive. And, 24% of all U.S. technology start-ups launched between 1980 and 1998 included at least one non-U.S. citizen as a founder, we apparently also need them to help create the new companies that produce such a large percentage of this country’s new jobs.

Given the importance I attribute to encouraging talented foreigners to study and work in the U.S., it may seem odd that I applauded a Thursday 30th Wall Street Journal article that showed that the number of visas issued this year will fall well short of the 65,000 quota for the first time in six years. This is quite a reversal from the typical pattern in which the entire annual quota for visas is snapped up on the first day they become available.

Why did I find this article encouraging? Because it provided at least some evidence that the market is self-correcting. It suggests that vendors, as they repeatedly insist, do bring in foreign workers to address skills gaps within the U.S. market, rather than as a means of substituting lower-paid developing company workers for U.S. workers. My hope is that such results may dampen some of the political pressure that surrounds this program.

The Sad Reality

But alas, such a reprieve is unlikely. First, as we all know, the current 9.8% unemployment rate will inevitably rise before it even begins to decline, and this decline promises to be painfully slow. Political pressure on the program is, therefore, likely to continue.

Just as importantly, another Wall Street Journal article from the same day suggested that the decline is indeed an anomaly—that it was largely attributable to the plummeting growth of Indian outsourcing contracts and that it will reverse as soon as these contracts begin to revive. After all, the vast majority of these visas are taken not by American companies looking for additional workers, but by Indian service providers that bring consultants into this country to assist on projects being performed primarily in India. In the article, N. Chandrasekaran, CEO of Tata Consulting Services, explained that while the company was actively expanding its offshore (i.e., non-Indian) workforce, most of this growth would be in other developing countries. In fact, Tata generally finds it easier, less expensive and more convenient to bring workers from India to address U.S. projects, than it is to hire U.S. employees.

There is, however, another even deeper reason why the demand for foreign technical workers will continue to grow. It is looking increasingly unlikely that the supply of highly trained U.S. STEM graduates will grow anytime soon. Although tentative initial evidence cited in a recent New York Times article suggests that U.S. college enrollment continues to increase, this gain is almost entirely attributable to growth in community college, rather than in four-year university or graduate school enrollment. Moreover, as discussed in my previous blogs, smaller percentages of U.S. university students are electing to study technical subjects.

And if we are really looking for discouraging news, we need look no further than another New York Times article that demonstrates one popular way in which the country is currently addressing the academic deficiencies of our public schools. According to the article, in fear of being penalized for not meeting No Child Left Behind performance requirements, 15 states have found a creative way of staying in compliance—they simply lowered the scores required to demonstrate proficiency.

Given the current state of affairs, the chances of increasing or eliminating the 65,000 per year cap on visas are probably below zero. The best we can probably hope for is a reprieve in populist and political pressures to limit the H-1B program. But, as much as I would like to hope for such a reprieve, I am afraid we will have longer to wait. The demand for talented scientists, technologists and mathematicians will continue to grow as the domestic supply of such people declines. And with unemployment rates expected to continue at high levels for the next several years, political and populist pressures against foreigners are likely to continue to grow.