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Infosys Tries to Turn Autoworkers into Programmers

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Although most of Infosys’ charitable activities are, as would be expected, focused on India, the firm also has a few global programs plus more focused contributions and work in many of the other countries in which it operates. For example, it contributed to and provided logistical support to the New York City fire department after 9/11 and continues to support educational initiatives, such as New York City’s STEM Mentoring program and efforts by local governments that need help in responding to natural disasters. Recently it launched a new, very different type of program that draws specifically on some of Infosys’ unique strengths and is intended to form the foundation for a much broader initiative.

A Second Chance for Ex-Autoworkers

As I discussed in two 2011 blogs, Infosys, along with a number of other Indian and multinational IT service companies have developed world-class training programs to bring graduates from India’s uneven college system to a common base of competence. Every one of Infosys’ computer science recruits goes through a 23-week Boot Camp at its Mysore Development Center, now called the Narayana Murthy Centre of Excellence.

It is now bringing this time-tested program to the U.S. in an attempt to retrain unemployed workers for new, high-skill jobs while simultaneously helping to address a growing shortage of skilled computer scientists and programmers. In March 2012, it launched an 18-week “Software Boot Camp” to provide unemployed Detroit autoworkers with an education comparable to a BS in programming.

The idea to boost training and employment opportunities for Detroit-area workers was initially spawned in a discussion with the Office of the Science and Technology Policy in the Office of the President. Washington then put Infosys into contact with potential partners and generally stepped back to let these partners design and run the program. Among Infosys’s primary partners in this endeavor are:

  • Wayne County Community College (WCCC) which will provide the facilities, manage the program and provide programming instructors who, after learning the Infosys program, will deliver it themselves and ultimately train others to deliver it;
  • The Workforce Development Department, which identifies and selects candidates who have lost auto industry jobs; and
  • The Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, which recruits and works with potential employers and will run a job fair to help the graduates find jobs.

Infosys is funding the entire program (which will be free to students) and is using the same curricula, courseware, exams and instructors as in Mysore. However, its Indian and U.S. programs have a few important differences. For example:

  • The Mysore program is targeted at new college graduates that Infosys has already hired. The Detroit program is open to older, non-employees who, after graduation, will be able to take jobs with any employer (including Infosys, for any of its 13 U.S. development centers) from which they receive an offer.
  • All Mysore students have a BS college degree in a computer science or engineering-related discipline. The Detroit program will accept graduates and non-graduates, with all types of backgrounds, who pass an entry test designed to assess analytical and quantitative capabilities.
  • The Detroit program, which is targeted at older people who have work experience, has been reduced from Mysore’s 23 weeks to 18 by eliminating the “soft skills” component that help new recruits adapt to a work in a professional, corporate environment.
  • While Infosys runs the Mysore program itself, the Detroit program was designed and is managed in conjunction with partners.
  • Infosys instructors conduct the Mysore program. These instructors will come to the U.S. to teach the first 18-week program, while training WCCC Computer Science instructors (initially 3 instructors) to take over the teaching—initially with oversight of and guidance by Infosys instructors, and later on their own.

The Detroit program is an experiment that is intended to determine the applicability of the Infosys training program to older students (an average age of 41) with diverse backgrounds. Although Infosys declines to discuss the background of the current students until the course concludes, they are clearly not the relatively heterogeneous lot of new BS Engineering and Computer Science graduates that make up a traditional Mysore class.

The company acknowledges that these factors, combined with its goal of maximizing completion rates, may combine to limit some graduates’ employability as programmers. It does, however, expect that even those who may not get jobs as programmers will be qualified for IT administration and support roles.

Scaling the Initiative

Where will this program go in the future? This will depend largely on the success of the initial class plus the determinations of employers and as to whether changes are required. Some big questions include whether there should be minimum educational requirements (such as a two-year or a four-year degree), whether students should be required to have a STEM-related background and whether the program can be evolved into a scalable, self-sustaining program that can be delivered by a broad range of non-Infosys instructors across multiple locations.

There are, of course, also a number of more nuanced questions, such as the types of jobs for which graduates will be best suited and how to best tailor the curricula, courses and pedagogy to the needs of students and prospective employers. The answers to such questions must await completion and a formal evaluation of the first program, as well as the success of graduates in getting jobs, feedback from students, instructors and employers and, of course, of Infosys’s partners.

While these and many other decisions must await the completion of the first Detroit program, Infosys has already begun to plan to expand this program and to launch others. For example, it hopes that WCCC will be able to immediately scale to three—and longer term—four programs per year, each with about 100 students. It also hopes to apply this same model to other constituencies and other geographies. It is already outlining a program that will be tailored to the needs of returning veterans (probably in conjunction with the Veterans Administration) and has initiated conversations with colleges and universities in other areas, such as Boston and Northern Virginia.

Such programs have the potential of delivering huge value. They can, for example, help:

  • Individuals acquire high-value, real-world job skills in areas for which there is strong and growing demand;
  • Community colleges develop and deliver more business-aligned retaining programs;
  • Cities and towns convert unemployed workers into participants in the knowledge economy; and
  • Companies, across all industries, beef up their IT staffs with professionals with up-to-date, state-of-the-art skills that can deliver immediate business value.

The program can also help Infosys. Although the vast majority of the company’s previous U.S. hires have been experienced professionals, it is now beginning to hire fresh out-of-school (“freshers”) for its U.S. development centers. While Infosys will have to compete with other companies in hiring such people, the programs will provide an expanded recruiting pool of people trained in Infosys methodologies, some of whom may help fill the company’s 300 current U.S. openings.

The program will also provide a supply of talent to Infosys customers (albeit also to its competitors). Just as importantly, it has the potential of improving Infosys’s public image by demonstrating its commitment to training U.S. citizens to provide the type of services that have recently gone offshore.

Although it is too soon to know how the current or subsequent Infosys efforts will pan out, the concept shows great promise. While community colleges have long offered all types of career retaining program, many such programs have not been well suited to actual market needs, much less to the needs of specific employers. Many of those programs that have been targeted to demonstrable market needs have focused on highly company- or industry-specific skills.

The Infosys effort has the potential of combining the best of both worlds—the broad reach and multi-employer appeal of traditional community college programs, with the teaching of specific, real-world skills for which there is a proven business need. Just as importantly, Infosys is providing these colleges with valuable intellectual property in the form of curricula, training materials, exams and even instructors that have already been proven in the training of tens of thousands of people who have gone on to successful IT industry careers.

As I have written previously, this approach is exactly the type of bridge between community colleges and the private sector that is required to retrain America’s workers (and possibly, in the future, initially train some of America’s students) for the jobs of the future. (See, for example, my 2011 blog series on the Future of Community Colleges). One can only hope that the results show as much promise as the concept and that it sparks the creation of many similar programs—by Infosys and hundreds of other companies—in many different fields and in many different cities. It is, however, somewhat ironic that it has taken an Indian company to pioneer a program for which the U.S. has such a critical need.

Posted in Community/Other Colleges, Corporate Social Responsibility, Infosys, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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The Job Skills of the Future, and of the Past

Sunday, March 25th, 2012

I have written much about the type of skills that 21st century knowledge workers will require in an era shaped by four forces:

  • Technology, which is eliminating growing number of traditional jobs and fundamentally changing the tools that will be available to (and the skills that will be required of) knowledge workers;
  • Globalization, where increasingly sophisticated knowledge-based jobs can be performed by increasingly highly-educated knowledge workers in lower-cost countries around the world;
  • The “New Normal” employment environment in which companies are reducing hiring and reducing benefits and job security by using contingent workforces—freelancers, contract workers and part-timers—to perform many functions that formerly were done in-house; and
  • Extreme volatility, where sudden, often unanticipated socio-political and economic events prompt rapid changes in our lives and work environments.

Knowledge workers who hope to thrive in this environment will require very different skills and a very different approach to and philosophy of work than their parents. They will, of course, continue to need deep functional skills in their chosen discipline, whether that be business, engineering, law or sociology. However, they’ll also require a broad range of complementary skills—what I call foundational skills—that will be required of people in all occupations. These skills which, as described in my October 30 article on Core Skills, include what I generally describe as high-level thinking, “Integrative imagination,” quantitative analytics, IT fluency and a range of soft skills, particularly around communications, teamwork and inter-personal sensitivity.

This month’s article draws on the work of three economists, MIT’s David Autor and Frank Levy, and Harvard’s Richard Murnane, who look at the role of two types of skills that will be particularly critical in helping knowledge workers protect themselves from, and capitalize on the effects of two of the most profound of the forces transforming the 21st century work environment—technology and globalization. These skills are:

  • Complex communication skills; and
  • High-level cognitive skills.

The Skills Matrix

Three primary articles by this trio of economists provide a framework for interpreting the very different ways in which the forces of technology and globalization will transform the U.S. Workforce. These articles are: Autor and Levy’s 2003 The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change; Levy and Murnane’s 2005/2006 How Computerized Work and Globalization Shape Human Skill Demands; and Autor’s 2010 The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market.

 

The authors divide work tasks into five categories:

  • Routine Cognitive Tasks: Mental tasks that are well-defined by deductive or inductive rules. Examples include dealing with simple customer service questions, many kinds of administrative tasks and formulaic tasks such as evaluating applications for mortgages.
  • Non-Routine Cognitive Tasks (Expert Thinking): Solving problems for which there are no rule-based solutions. Examples include the practice of law and medicine, scientific research, architecting software, managing complex organizations, as well as some non-professional careers such as diagnosing tough auto repair problems.
  • Routine Manual Tasks: Physical tasks that can be described though the use of deductive or inductive rules. Examples include all types of assembly line jobs and the counting and packaging pills into containers.
  • Non-Routine Manual Tasks: Physical tasks that cannot be well described by a pre-defined set of If-Then-Do rules, or that require optical recognition and fine muscle control. Examples include driving a truck or taxi, cleaning a building, gardening and serving as a health care aide.
  • Complex Communication: Interacting with humans to acquire information, to explain it, or to persuade others of its implications for action. Examples include a manager motivating the people whose work she supervises, a salesperson gauging a customer’s reaction to a piece of clothing, a biology teacher explaining how cells divide and an engineer describing why a new design for a microprocessor is an advance over previous designs.

Routine cognitive tasks (which can be accomplished by applying defined rules) and routine manual tasks (that can be defined in terms of a specific set of movements) are most subject to computerization and, in many cases, outsourcing. Jobs based on these tasks, therefore, will increasingly disappear, at least in the U.S. and other high-wage countries. The vast majority of those that remain will provide little job security and will be subject to intense price pressures.

Non-routine manual tasks, meanwhile, are not generally subject to computerization. And since most of these services are site-specific, they cannot be readily outsourced. Most of these jobs, however, can be performed by people with relatively modest degrees of education and training and do not require particularly high levels of strength, stamina or hand-eye coordination. They, like those for routine tasks, will be subject to much competition and will provide low salaries and often, little job security.

Some of these jobs face an even greater threat in the future—information technology. Robots, for example, can already accomplish some basic non-routine tasks (such as vacuuming rooms while avoiding walls, furniture and pets). Google’s prototype self-driving car, meanwhile, has already driven several hundreds of thousands of miles with a driving record blemished only by a single minor accident (which was, reportedly, caused by human error). Although it will likely take years for future intelligent devices to achieve significant market presence, the future is already in the process of being outlined, if not actually written.

This being said, a few non-routine tasks do require special training and skills and produce particularly high-value results—think for example, of gem cutters and professional performers and athletes. The relative handful of people who qualify for such jobs will continue to enjoy high levels of differentiation and will often be able to command high salaries. Indeed, globalization and the rapid growth of middle classes in developing countries, has the potential of increasing the demand and compensation for such services and, in some cases, of creating globally-branded superstars.

The Job Opportunities of the Future

Although a tiny handful of non-routine physical workers have the potential of earning high incomes and gaining good job security, they will be the exception. For the vast majority of people, the higher-probability route to a rewarding career will come from the other two job categories:

  • Non-routine cognitive tasks; and
  • Complex communications.

Non-routine cognitive tasks go far beyond the type of problem-solving skills that are typically taught in middle- and high-school classes. Most such teaching involves problems with rules-based solutions, which, as the authors explain, are relatively easy to teach and to test. These are the types of cognitive skills that IT-based tools are most capable of addressing. The challenge is to teach the types of higher-order cognitive skills for which computers are less well-suited—those for addressing problems for which “the rules are not yet known”

These, as explained by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, include two types of problem. Those for which:

  • The information is hard to represent in a form that computers can use, such as feelings or impressions derived from viewing body language; and
  • Rules are difficult to articulate. This can include “complex processes” (such as those required to learn to ride a two-wheel bicycle), “pattern recognition” (the solving of problems that cannot be expressed in deductive or inductive rules), “divergent thinking” (as in starting from existing knowledge to develop new concepts and to ask new questions); and the ability to exercise “good judgment” in the face of uncertainty.

Complex communications also includes a broad range of capabilities. At the most basic, it entails the ability to describe (in speaking and/or writing) complex phenomena and patterns in ways in which people can understand, the ability to ask questions in ways that prompt people to think of issues in new ways, and the ability to listen to and/or read and comprehend concepts. At a higher level, it involves interaction (simultaneously communicating, receiving and processing), empathy (as in understanding and addressing the feelings and motivations of others) and persuasion (especially in selling your ideas and motivating others to action).

How will these skills be incorporated into, and in some cases, redefine tomorrow’s jobs? How do employers communicate the need for such skills? Most importantly, how will these high-level skills be taught (not to speak of measured) in a society that is finding it so hard to teach even basic skills?

Then there is the longer-term question. Will/when/how information technology is likely to impact, complement or transform these high-level conceptual and communications functions—and what will this mean for individuals’ ability to use these tools to differentiate themselves and deliver high-value services?

Up to a few years ago, such questions would appear to be little more than remote speculation. Then came IBM’s Watson—the computer system that handily beat the reigning Jeopardy champions.

Although it will take years for “intelligent” machines to effectively displace humans in non-routine cognitive tasks, Watson has already demonstrated its ability to work across both domains—complex communications and high-level conceptual analysis. It, for example, not only showed that it could recognize natural language, but also interpret idioms, parse puns and to do it all in fractions of a second.

As for its role in conceptual tasks, one of the first commercial implementations of the new system is likely to be as a diagnostic tool to help (although certainly not replace) doctors in the diagnoses of illnesses. Rather than displace doctors, however, the diagnostic system will initially be used to complement them—reducing their need to research obscure combinations of symptoms, prioritizing diagnostic options and presenting doctors with better information from which they can make their final decisions. The same is true in the second major commercialization initiative, in customer service for financial services companies where it will initially support human agents, helping them anticipate customer needs and ask more probing questions.

But, as explained in my February 20 article on Watson, the role of Watson and its successors will only grow, as they prove their capabilities, as software is tuned and as adoption spreads into additional fields, such as financial analysis, supply-chain management and technical support. Consider, for example, the number of customer support functions that are already handled without human intervention, even without the help of Watson.

I will examine these and many other questions surrounding the skills required for the high-value jobs of the future in subsequent articles.

Posted in Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Solutions to STEM Skills Mismatch

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

My December 26, 2011 blog, Expanding the Ranks of STEM Professionals, examined some of the realities and the myths behind the much discussed skills mismatch in the U.S. labor force; a mismatch characterized by a surplus of people looking for jobs, but a shortage of people with the skills for which employees are looking. This is reflected in an economy in which there are more than four unemployed workers for every job opening, but also thousands of unfilled positions (primarily technical) for which employers have been unable to find people with the required skills.

In a nutshell, the disagreement, as I explained in last month’s article, boils down to three interpretations of the shortage problem:

  1. We are not educating or training enough STEM professionals;
  2. We are educating/training enough people, but employers are not paying them enough to attract them from jobs in fields such as management consulting or investment banking. This problem is exacerbated by U.S. government policies that make it difficult or unattractive for U.S.-educated, foreign-born citizens to stay in the U.S. and by increased aggressiveness of emerging country companies (especially Chinese and Indian) to recruit and attract top university graduates with offers of permanent visas, comparable salaries, attractive benefit packages, and the promise of interesting, resume-burnishing overseas work; and
  3. We are educating/training enough people, but many have insufficient functional skills (in their specific discipline) or broad foundational skills (communications, cognitive, etc.) to be hired in STEM jobs.

Although proponents of each of these interpretations disagree on many things, they generally do agree on two issues:

  1. Our K-12 educational system is not doing a good job at teaching STEM fundamentals (and thereby not preparing students for college-level work in these fields) or in creating the type of curiosity and excitement required to motivate our best and brightest to become engineers and scientists;
  2. Employers, who are cutting back on their own training programs, will accept only graduates who can fill a current need or otherwise deliver immediate value.

In Search of “THE STEM Solution”

We certainly don’t and possibly never will, fully agree on all of the specific “cause/s” of the STEM skills mismatch problem. However, most agree that the tech industry is having trouble getting the number and quality of people that it needs. Many agree that the reasons for this are two-fold:

  • The imitations of our K-12 education system; and
  • A dearth of corporate training programs;

I, along with virtually everybody else who examines the education-to-career pipeline, fully acknowledge that K-12 education is at the root of many of our problems. Unfortunately, none of the experts seem to be able to agree on the cause of this problem, much less on its solutions. Even if they could agree, the educational system is highly unlikely to get additional money (or probably, even avoid additional cuts) from state and local governments. Moreover, even if we were to identify the magic bullet, and could afford to develop and shoot it, it would probably take at least half of a generation to begin seeing meaningful results.

Compared with fixing the K-12 educational system, improving corporate training programs should be a piece of cake. After all, big companies already know how to provide training. Some, particularly those with large operations in India and China, already provide extensive education and training programs to compensate for the big gaps in these countries’ educational systems. Although smaller companies may not have such capabilities, even they can retain specialists to develop and administer programs that are tailored to their needs. The “only thing” that it will really take to address these needs is money. This too, however, will be a very tall order in the current era of economic uncertainty and unrelenting belt-tightening.

Moreover, even if we identify solutions to, invest in and address both of these potential issues, what if the underlying problem—companies’ inability to find people suited to fill specific STEM job openings—is not resolved?

Plugging the Leaks in the STEM Pipeline

There is no question. We absolutely must work to fix the K-12 educational system—for the good of our society, as well as for our companies. I would also love to see a recreation of many of the traditional corporate training programs. Ideally, I would particularly like to see U.S. companies go further, as by creating programs of the type that are widely used in India—whereby companies establish their own schools in which all new recruits are brought up to a common, base level of capabilities and then provided basic training in the specific disciplines to which they will be initially assigned. Such programs, could be used both, for new graduates (whichever level of school is appropriate for the anticipated positions) or for current or displaced employees who need to be retrained for new jobs.

In reality, however, such hopes are little more than pipedreams, at least in today’s economic and fiscal environment. Although we can certainly hope for progress in each of these areas, there are a number of generally smaller, more incremental steps that have the potential of at least alleviating part of the core STEM skills mismatch problem. For example:

  • Employers can work with state and local governments to develop and continually update an online jobs guide, using a companies’ best estimates on which and how many positions are likely to be available over the next year, the next three years and the next five years, as well as the types of skills, qualifications and/or certifications individuals will need to prepare for these jobs. The postings should also provide anticipated compensation ranges, the schools and programs that train people for these jobs, and examples of potential career paths.
  • Employers can partner with schools—particularly two-year colleges and universities—to jointly develop curricula, courses and materials for teaching the skills that will be needed for these jobs. Employers should also provide volunteer instructors, tools (computers, software, machines, support, etc. on which students can get hands-on training and practice), and, where appropriate, create meaningful internships, apprenticeship or sandwich year programs.
  • Schools, local government organizations, companies and labor unions can invest in training and building networks of “career navigators” who can help students or transitioning workers assess their interests and skills; match these to colleges, curricula and career pathways; and guide clients through college planning and the college-to-career transition. Some non-profits, such as CAEL, already help companies, local governments and labor unions create such programs. It is also working with other organizations to develop an online training and certification process for these navigators.
  • Governments and unions could make it easier for companies to put people though through company-run or company-sponsored training programs, test-hire them at low or subsidized rates for defined periods and easily dismiss those who do not meet expectations.

Most importantly, all students and employees must take much greater responsibility for planning, preparing for and managing their careers and for continually upgrading their skills. They must seek out and proactively work with career navigators to identify and prepare for careers that match their interests and skills, and that are likely to offer strong long-term employment opportunities. They must select schools and employers that offer the educational and training opportunities that will prepare them for these careers. They must, though coursework, reading and extra-curricular activities, develop the foundational skills, as well as the functional skills they will require. And, in the current era of perpetual uncertainty, they must continually assess the long-term trends in their own and other potential career paths and industries, identify needs and opportunities for changes, and continually update and supplement their skills to ensure they will can provide higher and higher levels of value to current and future employers.

Posted in Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers | No Responses »
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Lessons For and From Cuba’s Educational System

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

In January 2012, my wife and I traveled to Cuba with Cuba Educational Travel to learn about the island, its educational system, its buildings and the country’s history.

The trip began with an overview of Cuba’s history, its political and economic systems and a broad overview of Havana and many of its cultural attractions. (For more details on the trip in general, see my travel blog www.ActiveBoomerTravel.com.)

Our primary mission, however, was to learn about the country’s educational system. We visited primary and secondary schools and some of the workshops and vocational programs that complement them, as well as one of the country’s most prestigious universities. We had lectures by and extensive chance for open discussions and questions with teachers, principals and students.

Cuba’s Commitment to Education

Cuba places an incredibly high value on education. The country dedicates about 10% of its budget to education (compared with 2% in the U.S.) and literacy rates are 98%. Classes are relatively small, with classes averaging 12 students per teacher, with a maximum of 25. (These ratios average 1:1 for severely mentally and physically-challenged students.) Education is compulsory through the ninth grade (secondary school) and high school graduation rates, although hard to measure in Cuba, are relatively high, especially in Havana and other large cities.

All education, including university and graduate school (assuming the student passes admission exams) is free and the quality is high, with elementary and secondary students consistently testing at the top of OECD’s ratings for Caribbean and Latin American countries.

The higher education system is also relatively strong. The country has almost fifty universities, plus pedagogical and polytechnic institutes that graduate an average of about 40,000 students per year. Its education and medical schools, in particular, are renowned throughout Latin America and Africa—regions which send students to study in Cuban universities and to which Cuba sends large numbers of teachers and doctors as part of the country’s large “soft diplomacy” programs.

Those who do not live close to these higher education institutions can take courses through a distance learning program which offers afternoon and evening courses through 15 different centers.

This being said, the Cuban educational system, for all its strengths, certainly has faults. As summarized by Catholic University professor Enrique Pumar, educational resources are highly vulnerable to economic cycles and graduation rates vary greatly between urban and rural schools. Moreover, Cuban educational institutions are not exactly bastions of free thought. All education is managed by, and all schools are operated by the state. All programs are, as per the country’s constitution, based on Marxist ideology.

This being said, we were generally impressed by what we saw in Cuban classrooms and what we learned speaking with administrators and teachers.

Cuba’s Primary and Secondary School System

Students attend schools for nine months a year. The school day begins at 7:50 AM and lets out at 4:50 PM, with a two hour mid-day break. This, however, is only part of the educational experience. After school, students go directly to “workshops,” for about two hours per day and another three hours on the weekend.

These workshops, whose programs are coordinated with teachers to build upon what the students are learning in school, provide opportunities to apply their school lessons to real-world tasks. Writing classes, for example, are complemented by exercises in conceiving and writing stories for, and publishing (via desktop publishing) newsletters; literature courses by writing and producing short plays, art classes by performing and even writing music, and so forth.

In addition to such “applied” programs, these workshops also provide a number of more generalized programs, such as those that teach and help demonstrate the rights and responsibilities of citizens, the history and how to address some of the needs of their communities, ecology and, for older students, sex education. High school-level workshops, are tied more closely to trades, academic specialties or even professions for which students demonstrate particular interest and aptitude.

College and trade schools

Admission into trade schools and universities are open to all who demonstrate aptitude, pass required entrance exams and possess appropriate skills (such as dexterity for skilled trades like carpentry, plumbing and metal work).

Some students go directly from secondary school to university, and those with the highest grades, admission test scores and aptitude in particular disciplines, to graduate or professional school.

Others take a less direct route that blends vocational and academic tracks. I found one program to be particularly interesting. The Havana-based Escuela Taller, is a trade school dedicated to restoring buildings in the city’s World Heritage Site historical district. Its staff consists of highly experienced trades people (masonry, carpentry, plumbing, electricity, etc.) and professionals and instructors in associated disciplines (urban planning, Spanish architecture, structural engineering and so forth).

While the program is nominally open to any 15-23-year-old boy or girl with a ninth-to-twelfth-grade education, admission is extremely competitive, with only about five percent of applicants accepted. Those who are accepted are assigned to a specific discipline, where they work with experienced trades people to learn their trades, while simultaneously taking academic courses in related disciplines.

Those who graduate from the rigorous two-year program can take one of two routes. Some go directly into the trade they have studied. Others, assuming they have completed their secondary educations (either before or part-time in the evenings during their time at Escuela Taller), may qualify for admission into university. (Although the Escuela Taller program is tailored to the needs of Havana, and are open only to city residents, other cities and provinces have similar programs.)

The Cuban education system, as evidenced by workshops and programs such as Escula Taller, focuses on integrating academic learning and the development of practical skills.

While the vast majority of this combination begins with generalized skills in primary schools, they become increasingly focused on career skills later in the education process. There are, however, a few exceptions to this broad approach of beginning with general education and skills, and gradually migrating to specialized disciplines and trades. The government considers a few areas to be sufficiently important and early focus and practice to be so critical, as to provide integrated career training from very early in the education process. These are primarily in:

  • Arts, including music, dance, theater, visual and media arts; and
  • Sports.

In both these areas, the system attempts to identify those with particular talent at very early ages and provides highly specialized integrated training programs to nurture these skills. Students are admitted at an early age, and take intensive coursework and workshops that are aligned to their specialties. They undergo regular, increasingly rigorous tests, with only the best admitted to the next level. Education in the arts culminates at Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). This highly selective conservatory, championed by and built on grounds that were selected by Fidel Castro, is located on the old golf course of an exclusive country club and is graced by lovely (albeit also quite run-down) contemporary buildings designed by famous architects. The conservatory, which selects the best of the graduates of specialized high schools, provides a rigorous and comprehensive education, with tracks aligned to each of its four artistic disciplines. Many of those who graduate are destined for lucrative careers in Cuba’s leading theaters, orchestras and dance companies and for independent careers in art, jazz and other related fields.

Implications for the U.S. and Cuba

Although the U.S. has long since migrated away from the type of educational tracking Cuba applies to arts and sports, there may well be opportunities for us to learn from Cuba’s general practice of integrating academic education and vocational training to help students better grasp the real-world application of their coursework, deepen their interests, and identify and prepare for careers in which they have interests and skills.

Such, formal, integrated programs could produce particular advantages in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), areas in which the U.S. is facing an increasingly serious skills shortage (or at least severe skills mismatch). Such a system could help address the huge leakage we are currently experiencing in our STEM pipeline (see my recent blog, The United States’ Clogged Technology Education-to-Employment Pipeline). The advantages could be especially great if the private sector becomes more actively engaged in the education process, helping schools not only identify the types of skills they will need in graduates, but also designing the academic curricula, designing and sponsoring the practical exercises and providing volunteers to show how these skills are used in actual jobs.

Speaking of STEM, we have to wonder why Cuba does not appear to focus anywhere near the level of effort on developing its STEM talent as it does on developing its artistic and sports talent—and especially its medical and pedagogical talent. As shown in a 2009 report by the Cuban National Statistical Office, see Figure Pumar’s article), 34% of the prior year’s college graduates were in medical sciences, 33% in education and 12% in sports (although art represented only 0.28% of graduates, this is probably due largely to the national dominance and selectivity of ISA).

What about math and science (other than medical disciplines)? These are among the least popular of majors, with agricultural science accounting for only 1.0 and the broader categories of sciences/math a measly 0.8. This is despite the fact that agricultural goods (especially sugar), minerals and biochemicals and pharmaceuticals (along with tourism) are already among Cuba’s largest sources of foreign exchange. Why does the country not place the level of emphasis on disciplines such as metallurgy, biology and chemistry, as it does on medicine, education and sports?

Why does Cuba not provide the same type of systematic programs for identifying particularly promising students at an early age in these areas? Or in providing the type of integrated academic/practical approaches to developing such skills as it does in sports and art?

Perhaps one day—at least once Cuba finally gets and provides ubiquitous broadband Internet access to its citizens—it could also use its educational system to create another economic opportunity. That of using its highly educated, low-cost labor force to provide information technology services to other countries.

This leads to another question—just what is the state of computer and Internet usage in Cuba in general, and in education in particular?

Computers and Internet in Education

Although information is limited, from what we have been told and have seen, schools often have up to ten computers in central computer labs. After-school workshops often have one, or more depending on level and specialty. While modest numbers of elementary and high-school students have access to home computers, many university students apparently do have their own laptops. This having been said, the value they derive from such machines is limited. The primary reason—Internet access is severely limited by a combination of factors including the country’s lack of a reliable broadband communications infrastructure, the U.S.’s embargo, the high-cost of access and the government’s own restrictions on use by its citizens.

Caveats

Although most of our group was relatively impressed by the facilities we saw, the people we met and our guide’s answers to our questions, we were under few allusions. We absolutely understand that what we saw, who we spoke with, and probably, most of what we were told, was carefully selected and approved by the government. Since none of us have specific knowledge of the Cuban educational system, we have no way of determining exactly what is true, how true it is, or how representative what we saw is reflective of the broader educational system.

This being said, the country certainly seems to be saying and—from what we saw—doing a number of the right things.

A forthcoming blog will provide my thoughts on the Cuban educational system in the context of the broader perceptions of Cuba gained from our January trip.

Posted in 21st Century Careers | 1 Response »
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Expanding the Ranks of STEM Professionals

Monday, December 26th, 2011

The U.S. industry in general, and technology-based sectors in particular, have decried the lack of STEM professionals and have called on everyone from government, educational institutions and non-profits to take steps to address the shortages. As I’ve discussed in numerous blogs, a growing number of companies (including IBM, General Electric, Intel, Exxon Mobil and many others) are taking matters into their own hands. They are sponsoring competitions and after-school workshops, funding scholarships and fellowships, helping universities create curricula and train instructors and helping their own employees identify promising career paths by providing skills maps and classes designed to prepare employees for future jobs.

Although such efforts are helpful, we need more—much more—if we are to provide an adequate pipeline of qualified STEM graduates, through all steps of the educational system, into STEM jobs. The first steps are to understand:

  • Why declining percentages of American students graduate with STEM degrees; and
  • Why so many of those that do graduate do not end up in STEM professions.

Leakage in the STEM Education Pipeline

As discussed in my July 31 blog, The United States’ Clogged Technology Education-to-Employment Pipeline, our shortage of STEM professionals begins in primary and secondary school and gets worse in every stage of the education pipeline.

According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, less than one-third of elementary school students are considered to be either proficient or advanced in science. This percentage declines steadily, to 21%, by the time they reach 12th grade. These declines are highlighted in international comparisons, with the OECD’s 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings placing U.S. 15-year-olds below the median ranking among 30 OECD countries in each of the three tested areas. They rank 16th in reading, 21st in science and 29th in math.

These deficiencies, however, have not discouraged college-bound students from pursuing STEM majors. Despite the fact that the 2011 ACT test found only 45% of graduates prepared for college-level math courses, and only 30% prepared for science courses, the percentage of incoming freshman who initially plan to major in STEM fields has increased dramatically (to 34% in 2009) from their lows in the 1980s and 1990s.

These plans, however, don’t last long. After getting a sampling of the rigors of college-level STEM classes, many switch majors to less demanding disciplines. In fact, while the number of college graduates has increased by 29% from 2001 through 2009, the number of engineering graduates grew by only 19% and the number of computer and information science grads actually fell (by 14%). A 2011 study by McKinsey Global Institute, “An economy that works: Job creation and America’s future,” generally confirms these trends, citing a meager 0.8% per year growth in the number of STEM graduates—significantly less than fields such as business, social science, humanities and arts.

Worse still, many of those that do graduate do not end up in STEM careers. According to one of the most comprehensive U.S. studies to date, only one-third of STEM graduates actually end up with jobs in these fields (see the below cited Lowell and Salzman study).

Causes of STEM Pipeline Leakage—Follow the Money

A preponderance of industry experts, analysts and educators, as discussed in the above-referenced “Pipeline” report, place the primary blame on a range of factors. These include:

  • A culture that does not sufficiently value technical skills;
  • A student body that shuns hard work and study required of STEM disciplines; and
  • Big gaps in all levels of the educational system—from a lack of qualified teachers and mentors in primary and secondary schools, a disconnect between colleges that educate future professionals and the companies that hope to employ them and a large pool of STEM graduates that lack the skills required for the jobs companies are looking to fill; and
  • Corporate training and educational systems that are ill-suited to the continual education, skills refresh and new skills training requirements of a dynamic jobs market.

This skills mismatch, or skills gap, is becoming severe. According to McKinsey’s “An economy that works” study, 40% of companies with plans to hire in the next 12 months have had positions open for six months or longer, because they couldn’t find the right candidate—candidates with degrees in the appropriate field and/or relevant work experience. Although these needs span all types of jobs, the most difficult occupations to fill are in management, science and engineering, followed by computer programming and IT. The study also highlights a big emerging gap in statisticians and mathematicians who can handle “big data” and, in the future, fill the rapidly growing need for health care professionals.

There is, however, an alternate school of thought, not only as to the causes and remedies of a STEM skills gap, but also as to whether such a gap even exists. For example, a 2007 and a 2009 follow-up study by B. Lindsay Lowell and Hal Salzman, Steady as She Goes? Three Generations of Students through the Science and Engineering Pipeline, claim:

  • There has been no decline in the total number of STEM graduates;
  • The number of graduates is sufficient to meet demand; and that
  • Many of these graduates are adequately qualified and prepared for available jobs.

According to their research, the primary problem is that only one-third of these graduates end up taking jobs in the fields in which they graduate. This drop-off, which began in the 1990s, spans all levels of students, from lower through upper quintiles. The drop, however, is particularly steep among those with the highest SAT/ACT scores and GPA averages—i.e., the best and the brightest of STEM graduates. Although their research does not show the reasons for this leakage from STEM careers, the authors see two possible reasons:

  1. Growing numbers of graduates are going into jobs that, while not specifically categorized as STEM, entail STEM skills—jobs such as patent law, medical sales and management in technology firms; and
  2. Growing numbers of the most qualified graduates end up taking jobs in fields that offer higher salaries (such as finance), more prestige and more varied experiences (such as consulting) or more flexible career paths (such as management).

In their view, the conclusion that today’s graduates are not qualified for STEM careers is “not supported by this data.” They believe that the primary problem is that the rewards of STEM careers are not sufficiently attractive to retain the best and the brightest graduates. Their primary recipe for attracting these graduates to STEM careers: increase pay.

Lowell and Salzman’s diagnosis of the problem and prescription for the solution are shared by others. Vivek Wadhwa of Duke and Berkeley Universities, in particular, has long argued that there is no shortage in STEM talent. The problems, as he lays them out in a TechCrunch face-off with ex-Intel chief Craig Barrett, are three-fold:

  1. Much of the nation’s talent is “bottled-up” in the form of postdocs (post-doctoral fellows hoping to get a faculty appointments) who are locked into a broken university technology education system;
  2. U.S. government policy makes it increasingly difficult and unattractive for foreign-born graduates of U.S. universities—who account for half of all U.S. STEM Masters and PhD graduates—to remain in the U.S.; and
  3. Technology firms do not pay top graduates what they are worth, particularly relative to finance and consulting companies.

Causes of the STEM Pipeline Leakage—A Skills Gap

Not all studies come to the same conclusions. The U.K., which faces a similar issue in which half of its STEM graduates take jobs in other fields, launched a series of studies into the reasons. Although these studies certainly admit a loss to higher-paying career paths, they, as concluded in a 2010 study, Shaping Up for Innovation: Are we delivering the right skills for the 2020 knowledge economy, also find some evidence for the possibility that some STEM graduates do not have the skills required to meet employer needs.

The authors cite a 2008 CBI (Confederation of British Industry) study finding that 42% of employers see the quality of graduates as a major barrier to STEM recruitment. A 2009 study that examined The Demand for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Skills, meanwhile, found that the occupations in which many of these STEM graduates actually end up, pay significantly less than jobs in STEM and finance. (A Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce compilation of U.S. salaries and unemployment rates by college major shows that STEM and finance jobs also tend to pay significantly better than, and have lower unemployment rates than, do jobs in most other fields.)

So, if STEM and finance pay better, and offer better employment prospects than do other fields, why would so many STEM grads shun these higher-paying fields to take jobs outside of the areas they had studied? According to the Demand for STEM Skills and the Shaping up for Innovation studies’ authors, there must be “some kind of mismatch between the type of skills STEM graduates have, and the type of skills sought in science occupations.” They do, however, plan to commission additional research to determine the extent to which these patterns are attributable to a skills mismatch, rather than individual choice.

What are these mismatches? Although they vary by sector, the CBI survey shows that employers’ primary concerns relate to candidates’ technical and practical skills. There is, however, a broad overarching concern that STEM candidates lack a number of softer skills in areas including problem solving, commercial awareness, team working, communication, interdisciplinary perspective and empathy for different points of view. (Note that this list is quite similar to that posed in my October 30th blog, Core skills Required in a Knowledge Economy.)

This all leads to a number of questions that I will address in subsequent blogs and in my planned book—what can be done do address these skills gaps and mismatches? What should students do today to ensure that they are best equipped to capture the jobs and build the careers of the future?

Posted in Creating the 21st Century Workforce, STEM Careers, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Helping Colleges and Universities Educate Tomorrow’s Knowledge Workers

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

My last blog reviewed some of the IBM Almaden Co-Evolution conference’s primary conclusions around the shape of the American job market, especially:

  • The state of today’s jobs market;
  • Where the new generation of jobs will come from; and
  • The types of skills these jobs will require.

This blog examines some of the conference’s follow-on conclusions, particularly around:

  • The capabilities and limitations of colleges and universities in helping students learn these skills;
  • How they will have to evolve to accomplish these goals; and
  • The type of cooperation—with primary and secondary schools, businesses, non-profits and governments—that will be required for colleges and universities to prepare knowledge workers for jobs that will be increasingly defined by the combination of globalization, technology and the growth of self-employment.

The Changing Role of Colleges and Universities

Colleges and universities are generally viewed as the primary, although certainly not exclusive source of many of the skills—both functional and foundational—that will be required for tomorrow’s jobs. True, the foundations for these skills must certainly be laid in secondary and even primary schools. Businesses, meanwhile, must help employees hone and refresh these skills. Most importantly, individuals will have to take primary responsibility for attending the schools, selecting the classes, choosing an employer and selecting the combination of extra-curricular activities that will help them develop these skills. For most, however, post-secondary institutions will remain as the single most important linchpin in the individual’s education-to-employment pipeline.

Many conference participants, including a number of university professors and administrators, concluded that few schools were currently fulfilling their missions. Their indictments and recommendations were generally in line with those of Clayton Christensen’s team’s February 2011 Disrupting College report.

Thousands of colleges, suffering from a type of “Harvard-envy”, short-change students by trying to simultaneously accomplish three primary missions: knowledge creation (research); knowledge proliferation (teaching); and helping prepare students for careers. While Harvard and perhaps one or two dozen other universities have the endowments and the cash flow to fund quality required for each, the vast majority of schools lack the resources and the skills to perform each of these tasks well.

Rather than trying to do all, most schools should focus on their core missions of knowledge proliferation (teaching) and preparing students for careers. They must also do so more cost-effectively, delivering quality education in a way that students and their families can afford without going deeply into debt. This will require the use of additional, more leverageable sources of learning, such as that from peers and tutors, and especially from learning technologies—including the potentially disruptive enabling technology of online learning. This will help free instructors from creating and even delivering lectures, provide them with insight into individual student needs and allow them to focus more time on addressing each student’s unique needs.

These schools, however, must also do much more—not only to prepare students for careers, but also to make them more “employment-ready” upon graduation. This requires deeper coordination with the private sector, not only in identifying the skills that are required for success in their companies, but also in providing more opportunities for “experiential learning” in which students have the opportunity to combine classroom, book and online education with experience in working on real-world problems, both in school (as in inter-disciplinary research centers) and in companies (as through apprenticeships and internships). Schools must determine how to give credit for these real-world experiences and also to apply (once they are developed and generally agreed upon) quantifiable metrics that assess educational outcomes. They should also, according to the Institute for the Future and my own research, specifically integrate the teaching—and especially the learning and reinforcement—of variants of the Institute for the Future’s ten foundational skills specifically into college curricula.

Cross Domain Educational Collaboration

Although colleges and universities are certainly critical links in the education to employment pipeline, they are not the only contributors. Primary and secondary schools must teach basic skills and provide a solid foundation for and passion for lifelong learning. They should also extend their current missions to provide solid groundings in the types of foundational skills that all employees—especially knowledge workers—will require in the new economy.

The private sector also plays a critical, but unfortunately diminishing role in educating their workforces. But although overall private sector investment in employee education rose slightly in 2010 to $52.8 billion, or $1,041 per learner, it has generally been falling since a high of more than $60 billion in 1999. Even so, a number of companies including Boeing and IBM (both of whom presented on their employee development efforts at the conference) continue to invest heavily (see, for example, my 2009 report in IBM’s Role in Creating the Workforce of the Future).

These and a number of other companies also work closely with schools, and invest in them—from primary to post-secondary—to help them develop curricula, fund teacher and instructor training, and develop workshops and internships to provide students with real-world learning experiences. Many companies, as discussed extensively in my blog, have partnered with secondary schools to improve IT education and train teachers on effective use of technology, with community colleges to prepare prospective employees for specific jobs and with universities to develop courses, curricula and entire degree programs.

Although such bilateral partnerships are certainly important, the conference concluded these are just the start. Corporations and schools must also partner with:

  • Foundations, such as Gates and Illuminata, to define desired course outcomes and develop metrics;
  • Non-profits, such as the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (both of which presented at the conference) to create pathways to help individuals create the educational experiences required to prepare for and advance their careers; and
  • State and local governments to identify the types of businesses they wish to attract, identify the resources and skills that will be required to attract employers, encourage and help local schools provide the required education and training and ideally, create online databases that help students and workers identify jobs and careers that will be available, the types of skills that will be required, and how these skills can best be learned and developed.

Although the Federal Government could, at least in theory, play an important role in identifying, mapping resources and coordinating efforts, the reality is that most economic development and education policy is done at a state and especially a local, rather than a national level. The most effective education-to-employment pipelines will probably require close cooperation by and deep commitments from mayors, university presidents, local business executives and local Chambers of Commerce.

 

Summary

U.S. colleges and universities must undergo huge changes if
they are to prepare graduate for tomorrow’s jobs—and do so at a cost that both
the students and the county can afford. For many, it will require a fundamental
rethink of their missions and their established practices. It will also require
much closer collaboration with the businesses that are likely to hire these
graduates.

 

 

Posted in Community/Other Colleges, Job and Career Opportunities, Other Schools, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Universities and Grad Schools | 1 Response »
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Tomorrow’s Jobs Require Tomorrow’s Skills

Monday, November 14th, 2011

 

At the end of September, IBM’s Almaden Research Center sponsored a conference on the future of jobs, the skills required for these jobs and how colleges, private sector companies and governments can individually, and in partnership, prepare people for these jobs.

The conference, titled Regional Upward Spirals: The Co-Elevation of Future Technologies, Skills, Jobs and Quality-of-Life, attracted participants from each of these sectors and from a number of think tanks. All focused on themes surrounding:

  • The growing shortage of educated workers;
  • How technology is transforming jobs;
  • Skills required for the jobs of today and tomorrow;
  • The role and challenges of colleges and universities in preparing a new generation of knowledge workers;
  • The role of the private sector in educating, training and helping employees refresh existing and develop new skills;
  • The need for partnerships among private and public sectors, academia and non-profits in closing the nation’s “skills gap;” and
  • The need to equip policymakers with better tools to model quality-of-life improvements generation over generation in regions, as infrastructure, skills, jobs change together.

The U.S.’s Growing Skills Gap

IBM’s Chief Economist, Martin Flemming, kicked off the conference by putting the current recession into historical perspective and aligning it with economist Carlotta Perez’s Waves of Technology Change, postulating that the economy is now in the transition between the installation and deployment phases of telecommunications and IT—between the initial implementation of these technologies, toward their use in fundamentally transforming business processes and societal institutions. Although such transitions typically result in slower investment and growth, this effect is now being compounded by our attempt to emerge from the financial recession.

A representative from McKinsey Global Institute then honed into our current employment problems by outlining some of the key findings of the group’s recently published report, An Economy that Works, explaining, for example, the unprecedented toll this recession has taken on jobs. This toll is particularly steep among those in low-skill/low-pay and mid-skill/mid-pay jobs. However, the unemployment rate among college graduates is still relatively low (4.2% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report) and the number of college graduates with jobs has actually grown by more than 1 million over the last two years.

In fact, many companies are unable to find all the educated workers they need—at least those with the skills they require. Forty percent of companies have had job openings for six months that they have been unable to fill due to lack of the proper skills. This is particularly true for specialized technical skills in science, engineering, computer programming and other areas of IT.

This skills mismatch, is likely to get worse before it gets better. McKinsey estimates that if the economy does improve, employers will face a shortage of about 1.5 million workers with college degrees (especially STEM degrees) by 2020. At the other end of the education spectrum, there will be a surplus of almost 6 million workers without high school degrees.

Skills Requirements

Just what skills are employers looking for? Clearly, as has been discussed endlessly over the last decade, employers have a deep, apparently endless need for STEM skills. Silicon Valley, as we always hear, has been continually ratcheting up the salaries (not to speak of the benefits) it provides the most promising computer science graduates.

Companies including Dow Chemical and IBM are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing curricula, funding courses and sponsoring research projects and fellowships in areas including chemical engineering and business analysis, respectively. At the conference, McKinsey highlighted the need for math and analysis skills by projecting a need for almost 3 million people (including more than 150,000 highly-trained “data scientists”) to extract business insight from “big data”.

In its An Economy that Works report, McKinsey groups these and hundreds of other job opportunities into six primary segments of the U.S. economy that it claims, will account for 70-85 percent of the up to 22.5 million new jobs (assuming strong growth) the country will create over the rest of the decade: healthcare (by far the largest), business services, leisure and hospitality, construction, manufacturing and retail.

There is, however, a caveat to even these projections. As Irving Wladawsky-Berger discuses in his blog on the conference, University of California Berkeley professor John Zysman discussed the ways in which “the algorithmic revolution” (the ability to codify activities underlying services and embed them into software) is fundamentally transforming the nature of mid-skill services jobs. The componentization of continually higher-level services functions, for example, is already making it easier to automate and offshore these functions.

Meanwhile, new innovations, such as IBM’s “Watson” has the potential of bringing this algorithmic revolution up into specialized realms of qualitative research and even expert knowledge. One of its first uses, for example, is likely to be in medical diagnostics, such as where a doctor can input lists of symptoms, medical histories, and a broad range of other relevant information to identify possible illnesses and recommended treatments. This, as I discussed in a previous blog on Watson, is only the first step in transforming medicine and the nature of knowledge jobs across all domains, and in changing and upgrading the types of skills tomorrow’s knowledge workers will require to ensure long, engaging and rewarding careers.

Just what skills will be required? Although each industry, and each job within it will certainly require specific combinations of functional skills, another presenter, from the Institute for the Future, cited its report, Future Work Skills 2020 to posit ten more generalized, foundational skills that will be required of most knowledge workers:

  1. Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed;
  2. Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions;
  3. Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based;
  4. Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings;
  5. Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning;
  6. New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication;
  7. Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines.
  8. Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes;
  9. Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques; and
  10. Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence.

Meanwhile, in another IBM conference on Leadership being held the same week in New York, Tom Friedman set the skills bar even higher, claiming that “Everyone has to bring something extra, being average is no longer enough. . . Everyone is looking for employees that can do critical thinking and problem solving . . . just to get an interview.  What they are really looking for are people who can invent, re-invent and re-engineer their jobs while doing them.”

This leads to yet another change in the job market that will require even more skills of tomorrow’s knowledge workers—companies’ growing reliance on part-time, contract and freelance employees as an alternative to hiring full-time employees. This means that more and more of tomorrow’s knowledge workers will, whether they want to or not, have to run their own companies or partner with others to create small business services companies. Not only will they need the skills required to manage a business, they must also have the skills required to work independently. Most importantly, they will need the sills to continually market and sell themselves, their ideas and their unique skill sets.

This is a very tall order. What must schools do to help students develop these skills—both functional and foundational? Are today’s schools really capable of doing so? How can other institutions, including companies, foundations, non-profits and governments help? These and a number of related issues will be discussed in my November 27th blog.

Posted in IBM, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Core Skills for Knowledge Workers in a Global Economy

Sunday, October 30th, 2011

The U.S. education system was created primarily to teach analytical, and to a lesser extent, communication skills. The vast majority of this education, especially at the university level, is segmented into specific domains. Although these domain-specific content and skills are certainly critical, many additional broad, foundational skills are required of a generation of knowledge workers that are capable of delivering high-value in a global economy.

Exactly what are these skills and why are they so important? I discussed some of these skills at a high level in my November 2009 article, Right-Brain Skills for 21st Century Jobs and discussed some of these and others in a number of articles over the last couple years.

Although nobody of whom I am aware has published a comprehensive list of such skills (as if there ever could be such a thing), I would include capabilities such as:

  • IT fluency, where familiarity and comfort with tomorrow’s tools is so deep that technology becomes the de facto, go-to tool to address virtually any business need;
  • Quantitative analytics, especially higher-level math, statistical analysis and analytics;
  • “Integrative imagination,” the ability to integrate information and ideally methodologies from disparate realms to create original new insights;
  • High-level thinking skills including focused research, information filtering and prioritization, critical and adaptive thinking, creative problem-solving and analytical systems thinking; and
  • Soft skills, such as written and oral communications, teamwork, social intelligence, leadership and cross-cultural awareness and sensitivity.

But what are the precise skills that will be required? How do the combinations of skills vary among occupations, industries and positions? Nobody really knows. Nor do they really know how these requirements will evolve in the future. There is, however, one thing we do know. Far too few people entering the workforce, or even that are currently in it, have a sufficient base of such skills.

These broad skills, although necessary, are not sufficient to prepare an individual for an interesting and fulfilling career. They must be complemented with deep domain knowledge in a particular field AND sufficient knowledge of a broad range of other disciplines and fields to provide an inter-disciplinary perspective enable cross-domain collaboration. This domain knowledge, however, must be built atop the core skills that are applicable to virtually any field.

But, to address the current “core skills gap” we must first answer some fundamental questions:

  • Which of these core foundational skills are most critical and most universal?
  • What are the best stages in one’s education and career to learn these skills?
  • How can they most effectively be taught and learned?
  • What responsibility for identifying and learning these skills should be assumed by the individual —and what by primary, secondary and post-secondary schools, by businesses or by other types of organizations?

Much of my ongoing research and writing will focus on these and related questions.

Posted in Skills Requirements, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools | No Responses »
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Scaling Infosys’ Educational Programs

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

Infosys, as discussed in my September 11 blog, has developed one of the IT industry’s largest and most comprehensive talent development programs. Although the program was created I India, and is by far the most mature, multifaceted and far-reaching in India, the company is now bringing parts of the program to other countries in which it operates.

From India to the World

Infosys has, for example, implemented versions of its CampusConnect program (which help colleges develop and launch business-relevant curricula and courses) in other countries in which it has Delivery Centers. It is, for example, working with Malaysian university faculties to improve IT education and with Mexican faculties to develop an IT curriculum to make programs more industry-relevant.

Just this month, it entered into an agreement with Singapore Management University (SMU) to jointly develop content, case studies and learning labs for both Infosys employees and SMU undergraduate and graduate students. They also plan to conduct joint seminars and tutorials and collaborate on currently unspecified research and pedagogy projects.

Infosys, however, is focusing the vast majority of its Out-of-India efforts on China, the county in which it has already hired 3,500 employees, with plans for another 8,500 in three years. For example,it  opened a Development Center in Shanghai and an Education Center in Jiaxing. This new Education Center, which will eventually accommodate 3,000 students at a time, will generally replicate the company’s Mysore curricula and courses, but tailor them to the specific needs of Chinese recruits. More than 650 recruits have already completed the Center’s foundation training program and another 350 in process.

The company is also beginning to work with Chinese universities. It has, for example, launched a Chinese version of CampusConnect and is working closely with local governments to extend the program to more schools in other regions of the country.

Multi-Lateral in India

Infosys is also working to scale its education programs by partnering with third parties. These partners include:

  • Individual companies, such as Microsoft, which is now participating in SPARK; and
  • Non-profits, such as NASSCOM, where it is sharing best practices with the group’s Education Council, for deployment across India; and
  • Pan-national organizations, like UNESCO, to share learnings and identify best practices that can be applied across many different countries.

The company also forges more informal cross-border relationships. For example, it regularly invites industry bodies and faculty from other countries to visit Mysore. They have hosted a range of countries, from barely emerging (like Bhutan and Rwanda) and solidly industrializing countries (such as Thailand and Colombia) to learn and deploy capabilities in their own countries.

Applying Indian Learnings to Developed Countries

Cross-border learnings on employee development and most other business processes typically flow from more developed countries (which typically have the educational institutions to create and the corporations to test and develop best practices around these processes) to less developed countries.

Perhaps, however, it is about time for more such learnings to migrate in the other direction. Companies ranging from Proctor and Gamble and General Electric Medical Systems have developed products specifically for emerging countries that have since been migrated to developed countries. There are similar opportunities for migrating business models, such as Li & Fung’s supply chain practices and Bharti Airtel’s use of variable cost, virtual infrastructures.

On one hand, it may seem strange to suggest that countries like the U.S. and England—countries that virtually invented and still have some of the best colleges and corporate talent development and management practices in the world—could learn much from India. That country’s IT services sector, for example, is prospering only because the private sector was forced to develop capabilities that the public sector was not capable of providing.

But in many senses, developed countries are now facing some of the same challenges as developing countries. These include a sclerotic education-to-employment pipeline that does not seem capable either of:

  • Preparing students with the skills that will be required in an increasingly global knowledge economy, or of
  • Reskilling current workers who must learn totally new skills to qualify for new jobs in their current industries, much less those in new growth industries.

This is certainly not to suggest that emerging country companies have some type of inherent advantage over developed country companies, either in helping schools to graduate more employment-ready students or in proactively developing the skills that current workers will need for tomorrow’s jobs. After all, Western IT services companies such as IBM, HP and Accenture, were faced with many of the same challenges as their Indian counterparts in growing the Indian talent pool. These companies addressed their Indian needs in much the same way as did the Indian IT services firms. All of these companies–both Indian and Western–are now applying similar practices to develop their Chinese labor forces.

Some Western companies–especially IBM in universities and Microsoft in secondary schools—are at least as active in partnering with U.S. schools as Infosys is in partnering with Indian schools. It is, however, a shame that such actions are not ubiquitous, across not just the technology industry, but all industries.

Given the seemingly intractable challenges faced in reforming our education system and in addressing the worsening mismatch in the skills that students graduate with, versus those needed by employers, this country’s education system seems to need at least as much help from the private sector as do those in China and India. In fact, in some ways it needs even more, since U.S. and European students are increasingly turning away from the type of STEM educations that Indian and Chinese students crave.

Perhaps many more companies, across all industries and countries, have something to learn from the Indian IT services industry’s experience in educating, developing and managing talent.

Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Infosys, IT Industry Role in Education, STEM Careers, Universities and Grad Schools | No Responses »
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Lessons from Infosys’ Employee Development Program

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

While India certainly has a few world-class universities (especially in technology), its overall educational system is, to say the least, limited.

Despite these limitations, Indian and Western IT services firms have managed to build a million-person IT services industry that is the envy of the world—rapidly progressing from providing basic, low-cost services, to delivering not only world-class development capabilities, but also sophisticated business consulting and process reengineering skills.

How were these companies able to shape such a limited supply of human resources into a world-class talent development machine? By directly assisting engineering institutions and business schools and, especially, by taking over many of the educational tasks that are typically handled by educational institutions.

Although all of the major firms—both Indian and Western—are assuming similar roles, Infosys is clearly one of the leaders, both in how it partners with educational institutions and in its own employee development program.

Pre-Employment Education

Infosys’ employee development process begins well before it actually hires a person. In some cases, the process can track back to its corporate philanthropy programs, as with programs such as SPARK (one-day introductory experiences for high-school engineering students, hosted at Infosys development centers) and Catch Them Young (a two-week program in which 9th-grade students learn the basics of information technology). Through these programs, which have touched more than 320,000 students in the last 3 years, Infosys has also donated technology, including almost 1,000 PCs, to schools.

The company’s primary work with educators and students, however, focuses on colleges and universities. Its CampusConnect program, for example, helps Indian colleges develop and adapt courses and curricula that teach more “industry-relevant” skills. The company develops curricula, courseware and methodologies which are published on its CampusConnect portal. The program trains faculty to deliver these courses through activities including:

  • Bringing college student and faculty groups to Infosys centers for training and exposure to Infosys practices and technologies;
  • Funding train-the-trainer programs and two-to-three-month faculty sabbaticals on an Infosys campus; and
  • Sponsoring regional meetings and monthly Webinars to inform faculty of new developments and provide opportunities for them to communicate and establish communities among themselves.

Students who don’t have access to the program through their colleges and universities can access the CampusConnect portal themselves, where they can download and work through Infosys courses on their own. Since its launch in 2004, the program has worked with more than 6,500 faculty members in more than 500 colleges and universities, reaching more than 135,000 students.

Although the vast majority of the company’s campus outreach efforts are targeted at engineering institutions, it has smaller, more focused programs intended to reach those in other disciplines. B-school Connect, for example, is intended to help business schools create bridges between theory and actual business needs and particularly to show the critical roles that IT plays in management, such as by helping them create topics in business analysis. Project Genesis, meanwhile, is intended to help science, commerce and liberal arts majors develop analytical and communication skills required for careers in Business Process Outsourcing.

All of these university programs, not to speak of the company’s own in-house programs, also have a critical sub-theme and objective—to help students and employees develop confidence in their own abilities and to improve their ability to make contributions to their employers.

These campus programs are not specifically tuned to teaching skills that will benefit Infosys or to directly promote Infosys as an employer. This being said, however, they do provide visibility into the company and, through its engagement with institutions, helps the company attract promising students. They can also lead to internships, both domestically and internationally through the company’s InStep program. These internships often lead to full-time jobs.

The company, in fact, typically relies on its 500 CampusConnect partners for up to half its new recruits. These partner schools however, are primarily second- and third-tier colleges and universities. After all, the tier-one schools, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, with which we have become so familiar, don’t really need all that much help. Moreover, their graduates are more likely to go to graduate school, than they are to seek direct employment.

Learning the Infosys Way

Infosys begins its formal employee education process as soon as it hires a new graduate.

Each new engineer is enrolled in the company’s 23-week residential program (there is a separate, shorter program for new BPO recruits) at the company’s Mysore Development Center. All go through a basic software engineering course before being assigned to deep dives. Software engineers, for example, will typically focus on a particular application (particularly SAP, Oracle or Microsoft) or technology (Java, Mainframes, cloud, mobility and so forth). New business analysts, meanwhile, will go deep into a particular cross-industry domain (such as finance, human resources or procurement) while project managers focus on project management techniques and Infosys processes.

This, however, is only the first step in a career-long continuous education process. Roughly 95% of those who successfully complete the Mysore program are then assigned to specific groups where they begin to learn how to apply these skills to the needs of Infosys’ clients. Each employee gets regular reviews and options for different career paths. They are also required to take continuing education courses and meet defined certification criteria.

The company currently offers 1,500 such courses in each of the technologies and business domains on which the company focuses, plus a growing number of courses in soft skills, such as communications and presentations. But while most initial training focuses on technology and soft skills, they become increasingly exposed to iness-based courses, in areas such as business value and specific functional and industry processes, in their later years with the company.

In fact, each employee must meet all the milestones and complete all of the certifications required for their current roles before they can be considered eligible for a promotion. These promotions can be either vertical (more responsible positions in their current role) or lateral (such as from software engineering into consulting or technology architecture).

As expected, Infosys provides selected fast-track employees with special attention. Identified leaders are enrolled in the Infosys Leadership Institute, which provides highly customized assessment, personal development and mentoring programs. This program, however, covers only about 850 of the company’s 130,000 employees and is limited to three tiers of employees:

  • Tier One, who currently lead departments;
  • Tier Two, who are likely to lead departments in three to five years; and
  • Tier Three, who are likely to become Tier 2 employees in three to five years.

All employees, meanwhile, are encouraged to provide some contribution to India’s educational system. SPARK classes, for example, are taught by more than 10,000 Infosys volunteers in a given year. Volunteers also play key roles in Catch Them Young and other programs conducted at Infosys Development Centers. The company also helps employees who would like to make deeper commitments, as by paying 50 percent salary to those who dedicate their sabbaticals to teaching at educational institutions or working at non-profits.

As expected, the vast majority of Infosys’ efforts are dedicated directly to working with Indian schools and Indian employees. But, as I discuss in my next blog, it is expanding a number of these programs to other countries. It is also partnering with non-profit institutions and other companies to scale its programs, both in India and around the world.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Education System and Institutions, Infosys, IT Industry Role in Education, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | 1 Response »
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