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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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Elementary, My Dear Watson?

Sunday, February 20th, 2011

Don’t get me wrong. There was absolutely nothing elementary in IBM’s phenomenal work on Watson. The public debut of the machine (actually the real “magic” was in the software, rather than the hardware), was a triumph in a world that had been claiming, as far back as the 1980s, that “artificial intelligence” was just around the corner.

Still, there is indeed something about Watson that is clearly elementary: something that should give us great hope for the future—both Watson’s and ours.

The “Jeopardy Challenge” , in which IBM’s “Watson” computer handily defeated the two highest winning players in Jeopardy history, was only the latest in a series of Grand Challenges, in which IBM pushed the envelope of computer science to perform tasks that were previously considered beyond the realm of computers—the use of IBM’s Deep Blue in beating the world chess champion, Blue Gene’s role in decoding the human genome and even IBM’s role in enabling the U.S. the land a man on the moon.

Watson, however, went an order of magnitude beyond these previous triumphs of computer power. While the computer’s encyclopedic database and computational power certainly enabled its success, these capabilities were already available on off-the-shelf IBM hardware (2,800 cores and 15 TB of memory in 90 of its Power 750 servers and 20 TB of disk storage linked in a cluster).

Its real accomplishment was in its ability to interpret not just natural language, but the types of puns, metaphors and idioms that have come to characterize Jeopardy. This was enabled by a combination of off-the-shelf hardware and especially the secret sauce embedded in the Jeopardy-specific algorithms over which IBM researchers wrote, tested and tweaked over the last three years. And don’t forget the confidence rating and wagering algorithms which, while resulting in numbers that may have sounded strange to humans, were based on calculates of the odds for all types of contingencies.

Will the Real Watson Please Stand Up

Watson was certainly not perfect in its victory. In the first night’s contest, Watson modestly bested the score of one of its human competitors, and only tied that of the other. Night two, in the first round of Double Jeopardy, things got downright scary, with Watson being the first to buzz for, and correctly answer 24 of the 30 total questions. Watching the frustration of the helpless humans, one could be forgiven for thinking of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL.

Then, with its blunder on its first round Final Jeopardy (Did Toronto recently secede from Canada and join the U.S.?) and its “merely human-level” performance (although it did reach a number of correct answers, but not in time to beat the other contestants) in round two, I got really scared. I began asking myself whether Watson consciously “backed off”, avoiding running up the score, either out of empathy for its flailing competitors, or out of fear that a machine that so dominated humans would be feared and shunned by society. While Watson did end up winning the three-night competition, the ultimate outcome wasn’t really determined until the last Daily Double, and the wager (that ensured it could not loose) that it made on the last Final Jeopardy question.

Why did I find this so frightening? Because I, who have been in the IT industry for more than 30 years, actually began to attribute human feelings to a hunk of silicon!

It is Indeed, Elementary

But I digress. As I discussed above, there was absolutely nothing in IBM or Watson’s Jeopardy performance that was “elementary.” It was, by any account, a stellar achievement.

So, what was so elementary about Watson’s triumph? The comparison of its success in winning a television game show, to:

  • The enormous challenges that civilization faces (and, not coincidentally, that IBM is attempting to address with its Smarter Planet initiatives); and
  • The contributions that Watson technology and learnings have the potential of making to addressing these challenges.

First, let’s recognize—Watson is a room size machine, residing in a specially designed and extensively cooled data center and that even its off-the-shelf components (without even accounting for the cost of developing the algorithms that were so fundamental to its success) cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But, as Computer Intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil explained in his February 17 Wall Street Journal editorial, at the current rate of computer price-performance advances, Watson’s power is likely to fit within single server in about seven years and within a PC in a decade.

Just as importantly, a “real-life” system would not have to contain the sum total of world knowledge. These systems will be:

  • Tailored to the needs of a specific discipline (such as medicine or finance) or the needs of a specific company;
  • Will have access to the Internet, third-party search tools and external databases, rather than having to operate as a self-contained unit; and
  • Will not be required to devise answers that meet its minimum confidence levels within the three seconds that are required for Jeopardy.

Watson-like capabilities, will, in other words, be available to the public (or at least some segments of the public) within the next couple years. Meanwhile, IBM has already partnered with Nuance Communications to bring speech recognition capabilities to Watson (initially, specifically for healthcare).

Watson’s Next Careers

After Watson’s first (albeit brief) stint as a television star, it is ready to explore more “mundane” careers. But what are these careers likely to be?

While the Star Trek computer was a model for at least some of IBM’s researchers, most of Watson’s opportunities will be much more down-to-earth. Many are based on the coupling of Watson’s “Deep Question Answering” technology and deep analytics in decision support applications. Possibilities—or indeed, probabilities—may include:

  • Customer Service, which could improve service time and quality while simultaneously disrupting a business model in which so many call center jobs have moved to low-cost countries;
  • Financial Analysis, such as in the combing of huge quantities of structured data and unstructured information to identify likely acquisition targets;
  • Travel, such as in a new-generation navigation system in which drivers can ask for best ways of avoiding traffic, or more interestingly, to suggesting routes from X to Y that take one past attractions that best meet your profile, such as museums, restaurants or wineries that make 90+ point wines; and
  • C-suite assistant, to identify and assess business trends, evaluate a broad range of contingencies or running what-if analyses, such as the impact different product and advertising mixes may have on revenue and profitability.

This leads to what is probably the most important and imminent of applications for Watson Technology—its use in health care. Although the potential applications are numerous, the first and highest-impact application is likely to be in 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.

Better yet, it could be used to review individual electronic medical records to identify symptoms that a doctor may miss or large volumes of electronic records to identify linkages that have not previously been discovered. Longer term, it could even be used to bring first-line diagnostics to remote, emerging country villages that do not have access to doctors, such as by allowing nurses or technologists to input systems into a computer, to a remote Watson-based diagnostic system.

Many potential applications, as in health care or engineering, could face big legal questions. What if Watson made a mistake in diagnosing an illness or in calculating tolerances for a bridge? Or what if Watson correctly suggested an option, which was dismissed by the doctor or engineer? Or have we taken the first step into the science fiction era, where computers may obviate the need for humans in even some of the most demanding of professions?

While the answers to such questions will have to wait, the application of Watson technology to these challenges will not. The day after Watson’s Jeopardy victory, Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland Medical School announced a plan to work with IBM on health care analytics research, with a goal of launching a commercial diagnostic and treatment offering over the next 18-24 months.

We will have to wait to see whether Watson will be as successful in its future careers as it was in its first. My guess, however, is that Watson’s descendants will have as great an impact on society, business and the nature of knowledge work, as the Internet.

Posted in IBM, Innovation/Entrepeneur, Job and Career Opportunities, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | No Responses »
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The Draws of Specialized MBAs and Business Masters Programs

Sunday, December 5th, 2010

My three previous posts on MBA programs examined the challenges that B-schools are currently facing, how a growing number of programs are responding to these challenges by developing specialized programs and then by drilling down into the ways in which some programs were migrating into increasingly narrowly defined sub-specialties as a means of targeting specific market opportunities and more effectively differentiating their programs from those of other specialized schools

The Growth in Specialized Business Masters Programs

This trend toward specialization continues to grow, with the vast majority of new degree programs now being specialized. While the trend, as suggested in the below Figure, is still growing in the U.S., it is already very well established overseas. (The University of Manchester, for example, now offers 26 specialized business masters degrees.) And interestingly, these programs appear to be more popular among women (48.4% in U.S. and 47.0% in international schools) than are the general programs (37.1% and 37.4%).

Figure: AACSB Member Master’s Degree Programs (2008–2009) number of schools offering at least one program in each category

Business Master’s Degree Programs U.S. International
General Master’s Degree (MBA) 454 160
Specialized Master’s Degree 298 140
Business Master’s Degree Enrollments U.S. International
General Master’s Degree (MBA) 151,215 89,200
Specialized Masters Degree 39,250 56,670
Source: Association to Advance Collegiate, Schools of Business

In fact, what began as a means by which small, second-and third-tier regional schools could tout pragmatic advantages relative to their larger, better known, more highly-ranked counterparts, has as discussed in my blog on sub-specialties, is even beginning to spread into some of the tier-one B-schools, including MIT, Carnegie-Mellon and Northwestern.

Why this growth? At a high level, business masters programs continue to be viewed as golden tickets to rewarding careers. The number of business masters conferred in the US has grown every year since 1969/70 (with exception of 1985/86, when the number slipped by 0.45%). When one digs a bit deeper, however, one finds that enrollment in traditional, full-time, two-year MBA programs has, at best, held its own over the last decade. All of the growth has occurred among non-traditional programs, such as part-time and executive MBAs, and especially specialized masters programs. Moreover, according to the fascinating new book, Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads, the health of full-time programs is effectively confined to the top 20-ranked U.S. B-schools. Full-time program enrollment in Tier Two schools (ranked 21-36) have fallen 17% over the last 8 years and lower ranked schools have fallen even more sharply. One-year degrees—driven largely by specialized programs—are already established as the de facto standard in Europe (although two-year programs continue to grow rapidly in Asia and Latin America).

Moreover, unlike the case in most recessions when MBA applications increase, applications are now falling. And so is demand for traditional MBAs. Hiring of new MBA grads has fallen dramatically during the recession and many of the traditionally favored employers (particularly financial services and consulting firms) have been forced to retrench. (Moreover, as discussed below, many of these firms had been reducing the percentage of MBAs in their hiring since long before the recession.)

Where is the growth? Canadian and European schools continue to see significant growth in applications and Executive MBA applications are up slightly. The real growth, however, is in specialized programs—especially those in accounting, finance and healthcare.

The Attractions of Specialization

This growth is largely a reflection of long-term global trend toward specialization. It is, however, being fueled by multiple factors affecting each of the three primary business education stakeholders: schools, employers and students. Schools (particularly local/regional schools and those below the top tier), are, as discussed in my October 24 post on B-School Challenges, are being buffeted by forces including falling enrollment in their core two-year programs, increased competition (both for applicants and for attracting qualified instructors) from European and Asian schools and challenges in placing graduates in attractive positions. As evidenced by their rapid adoption of specialized programs, they increasingly view specialization as the most attractive option.

Different schools, however, are taking different, and often multiple paths to specialization. Most programs, as discussed in my November 7 and November 14 posts, focus broadly on preparing students for jobs in traditional disciplines (such as accounting, financial management, IT management, brand management, supply chain management and human resource management) that are common across multiple industries and regions. New programs are being continually added (or existing programs tuned) to prepare graduates for the large numbers of jobs that are anticipated in fields including sustainability, compliance, risk management and business ethics. Other programs are targeted much more narrowly, as around the needs of specific and often local industries (including energy, wine, biotech and one of the most popular—healthcare).

Just as importantly, as explained by Michael Knetter, Dean of the Wisconsin School of Business, “the industry has been producing too many generalists relative to what is needed.” “The student satisfaction ratings and placement outcomes that we saw out of our specialized programs were far superior to what we found in our general management program.”

A growing number of prospective employers appear to agree. Although many companies do not yet understand or recruit from these programs (which I will discuss further in my upcoming December 19 post), some of those that do see much value in graduates that have specific education, proven interest, hands-on experience (as through internships) and, in some cases, deep technical and analytic skills, in specific industries and functions. This allows these graduates to make immediate contributions with little additional training—a particular value to companies (especially smaller and mid-size companies) that rely on “just-in-time” hiring for a specific job, rather than bringing in large classes of new graduates. These companies are also attracted by these graduates’ salary requirements, which are often closer to those of a bachelor’s degree in business, than those with a full, two-year MBA.

The Value to Students

Schools are looking to specialized business masters programs to attract more and different types of students (and better appeal to recruiters) while employers view them as a means of filling current openings with moderately-priced people that can deliver immediate value. In the end, however, for these programs to succeed in the market, they must attract students.

As I discuss in my next blog, the jury is still out as to whether these programs do or will yield better placement rates (much less cost/salary tradeoffs) than do more traditional business programs. However, they do present a logical and compelling case for improving a graduate’s prospects relative to less specialized and intensively trained (not to speak of higher priced) MBAs and less intensely focused (albeit lower priced) business bachelor degrees. This is particularly true since many of these programs tend to provide greater opportunities to balance theoretical education and real-world engagement (both through more hands-on and experiential courses and highly targeted internships and work/study programs) than to other business programs.

Just as importantly, specialized masters degrees also dramatically lower the financial bar for obtaining a graduate degree. They often cost less than half as much as a full MBA from a comparable school and slash the opportunity cost from two years to one. Such considerations can be particularly compelling both to students and their parents—especially during a recession and painfully slow recovery

Although such programs are definitely not for everyone (again, see my next blog, they do hold particular appeal, and promise particular value to certain types of students. Examples include:

  • Students with clearly-defined career objectives and self-starters who want the opportunity to chart their own paths;
  • Early-or mid-career employees looking to change careers (such as by leveraging math or IT skills into financial analysis), deepen skills in their current industry or function (such as brand management in specialty retail) or leverage technical careers into more generalized management career paths (as with the many business programs tailored specifically to the needs of mid-career scientists and engineers);
  • Undergraduate business students looking to deepen their technical skills or undergraduate technical students looking to integrate a management perspective atop their technical skills before entering the job market;
  • Students with less-than-stellar undergraduate records who may not qualify for top-tier MBA programs and will find it easier to distinguish themselves in a more differentiated, often less competitive environment; and
  • Those looking to complement current or contemporaneous masters degrees (general MBAs as well as degrees in fields ranging from education and architecture to sustainability and IT) as a means of improving or focusing their career prospects.

While all specialized business master programs have their own specific draws, proponents and detractors, two of the first, most proven and still most popular specialized business master programs—those in accounting and finance—offer particularly demonstrable benefits:

  • An MS in Accounting, for example, provides a means by which aspiring CPAs can bridge the gap between their undergraduate coursework and the 150-credit-hour requirement for the CPA;
  • An MS in Finance can provide the technical and analytic skills required to land a highly competitive position in financial services. These programs have also been instrumental in helping mathematicians, computer scientists and physicists leverage their skills into new careers as “quants” (quantitative financial analysts).

But for all the attractiveness and potential benefits of specialized business masters, they are not, as mentioned, for everyone. Many of these programs also have some serious drawbacks. These are the topics of my next post.

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Preparing B-Schools for the Challenges of the 21st Century

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

If student interest and enrollment is the criteria for the success of business schools, B-schools are on a role. Business, which has been the most popular college major for the last 15 years, continues to grow in popularity. It accounted for more than 21% of all bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2007–2008—twice the percentage of social sciences and history, the second most popular major. The MBA, meanwhile, has become the second most popular masters degree, accounting for 25% of all those conferred in 2007-2008. MBAs trail only masters in education, with no other discipline even close. And that was all before the recession—a condition that typically lead to a surge in college and especially graduate (particularly B-school and law school) applications.

B-Schools’ Growing Identity Crisis

But for all the student interest in B-schools, these institutions are facing something of an identity crisis. First, even business degrees are not protecting graduates from the ravages of the recession. Many graduates cannot find jobs at all and many of those who can are forced to take low-level positions far outside their desired fields and without the career or salary tracks they anticipated. They are struggling to repay big loans and, according to a study by Yale economist Lisa Kahn, most are unlikely to ever catch up with colleagues who had the good fortune to graduate in better times. Worse, the longer a new grad goes without a career-track job, the more difficult it will be to compete with more recent graduates for new positions.

With a recent Businessweek survey finding that only 38% of college seniors majoring in business having job offers, B-schools are going to incredible lengths to help their graduates find jobs. For example, they are scouring alumni networks, distributing tips via Facebook and Twitter, counseling students on resume writing and search and interview techniques and even teaching business dinner etiquette. The schools’ challenges, however, go deeper then the needs to address the immediate challenges of the recession. They are, for example, simultaneously struggling to retain their relevance, as by ensuring that:

  • Their educations remain relevant in an era where the nature and requirements of virtually all jobs—and therefore of education required to prepare graduates for them—are being fundamentally transformed by forces including technology, globalization and demographics (see a number of my previous blogs for fuller discussions of these new skills and education requirements);
  • Their pedagogies adapt to the rapidly growing need for managers and executives to think globally, transcend cultures, contribute to the success of teams and embody inter-scholastic, as well as inter-disciplinary perspectives;
  • The schools retain their attractiveness in an era where growing percentages of applicants —both foreign- and U.S.-born—are applying to increasingly credible European and Asian schools to prepare for overseas postings and increasingly global careers; and
  • The fundamental nature of a B-school education is being called into question by the ethical lapses that contributed to the financial crisis and growing calls to establish management a “self-policing profession”, like medicine and law.

So, in a period in which B-schools might otherwise be celebrating their popularity, they are instead being forced to rethink the entire nature of business education and their role in preparing graduates for a very new age. Not surprisingly, different schools are coming to very different conclusions:

  • Some B-schools, especially local and regional schools, are effectively narrowing their focus and converting traditionally broadly-focused programs into highly specialized curricula intended to prepare students for specific jobs;
  • Others, especially many of the world’s leading B-schools are redefining their curricula to provide much broader, much more holistic educations that are intended to prepare aspiring executives for a totally new era of management.

My next two posts provide overviews of each of these two trends and their prospects for addressing the challenges that are facing business educations in general and B-schools in particular.

Posted in Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Universities and Grad Schools | No Responses »
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The Community College Contribution

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

As I discussed in my June 25 blog (Occupational Opportunities for the Next Decade), the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010 Occupational Outlook Handbook shows that 46 million jobs (30% of those in the U.S.) will soon require more than a high school education, but less than a four-year bachelor’s degree. The nation’s 1,200 community colleges are—and will continue to be—the primary source of this education as demand for individuals with two-year technical degrees grows faster than that for those with a full university degree.

These institutions, which enroll a total of 11.8 million, or 43% of the country’s undergraduate students, play five critical, but very different roles in our educational system, providing:

  • Transfer Education, for students that will transfer to a four-year institution to pursue a BS/BA degree;
  • Career Education, for those that will graduate with an Associate Degree and directly enter the workforce;
  • Developmental Education, remedial education for high school graduates who are not academically ready to enroll in college-level courses;
  • Continuing Education, which entails non-credit courses for personal development and interest; and
  • Industry Training, which is contracted for by companies to provide training for specific jobs.

Of the 930,000 students who completed formal courses of community college study in 2009, 65% graduated with Associate Degrees (which typically require the equivalent of roughly two years of full-time study). The other 35% end up with certificates, such as a GED (General Educational Development) high school equivalency or Industry training certificate.

Engines of Social Mobility

Community colleges, however, do much more than confer degrees or certificates. They are also one of nation’s the most effective enablers of social mobility. community colleges, for example, have open admission policies, offering degree-track admission to anyone with a high school diploma or equivalent, regardless of grades. And, according to data from the American Association of Community Colleges, tuition at public community colleges costs an average of 64% less ($2,544) than those for public four-year colleges and 1/10th to 1/20th the cost of many private four-year schools.

They also cater to disproportionately higher percentages of ethnic minorities (40% of total enrollment) and first-generation college students in their families (42%). And since they are so geographically widespread, with campuses or extension centers within an hour’s drive of more than half of the nation’s population, they provide a critical source of education and vocational training to commuters, those who live in rural areas and those who must work part-time. In fact, according to AACC, 60% of all community college students are enrolled part-time (with 89% of these working either full or part time) and of those who do attend on a full-time basis, 80% work (with more than a quarter of these working full time).

Those students who attend community colleges—and especially those who graduate—are generally rewarded with higher-paying and more secure jobs than those who with only a high school diploma. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, for example, show that those students who attend, but did not receive an Associates’ degree from a community college, typically earn 13% more than those with just a high school diploma. Those who complete a degree earn 21% more. Both are also correspondingly less likely to be unemployed. Those who take, and ideally earn certificates and degrees in technically-oriented math and science courses, earn significant premiums (about 14 percent for men and 29 percent for women) over those in less technical fields.

Local Economic Development Engines

These schools also play important roles in helping their communities develop their economies. They do this by upgrading the skills of their community’s labor force, both in providing remedial and vocational training to “traditional” students who have just recently graduated from high school, and especially to older, non-traditional students. These include those who return to school to freshen or sharpen existing skills, homemakers or welfare recipients who are preparing to enter the labor force, immigrants looking to improve their language skills and displaced or dislocated workers who are seeking to retrain for a new occupation that offers better employment prospects.

Since many vocational graduates tend to seek jobs in their own communities, most of these schools tend to be highly attuned to the needs of local businesses, tailoring courses and curricula to the needs of local industries and often partnering with specific companies to:

  • Provide customized or contract job training, as where they develop programs that are tailored to the needs of specific companies; or
  • Develop cooperative education programs that combine classroom learning and practical (typically paid) on-the-job experience.

These colleges can also play much more proactive roles, as by partnering with state and local governments to provide business development services. They may partner with the state to create and operate entrepreneurial training centers or government-funded small business development centers (SBDCs) or participate in the creation of regional economic development plans. Colleges also actively partner with government agencies and Chambers of Commerce to attract corporations to build or expand facilities in their communities, by serving as a third-party training arm to teach local citizens the skills required by these new employers.

They may also play much more defensive roles, as by contracting with cities and states to retrain plant-closing victims for new jobs in totally different fields. The State of Michigan, for example, provides tuition assistance to community colleges that retrain displaced auto workers for careers in other industries—especially health-care.

On-Ramps to Higher Education

Community colleges also play another critical role in society: that of a feeder system to universities. A large percentage of students enter community colleges with the express intention of transferring to four-year universities and the recession is prompting growing numbers of four-year students to temporarily “drop down” to community colleges to cut costs.

Overall, about 29% of all community college students end up transferring to four-year universities and 17% of all bachelor degree holders had previously earned associate degrees. These transfer and “step-up” processes are facilitated by the existence of “articulation agreements” that specify which courses credits will and will not transfer to four-year schools. With careful planning, students can transfer most, if not all their credits.

The result is millions of low-income, minority and late bloomer high school graduates who would not have been able to afford to attend or get accepted by four-year universities, end up with four-year, and in some cases, graduate or professional degrees. And with university costs doubling over the last decade and rising at twice the rate of those for health care (see my July 11 blog “Is College Still the Best Road to the American Dream?”), the role of community colleges as a first-step to a four-year degree appears likely to increase.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Given the value community colleges provide, their popularity should come as no surprise. The growing demand for educated workers, combined with the rapidly growing cost of a four-year university education has led enrollment in these colleges to expand at about twice the rate as for four-year universities. Now, the recession is prompting more high-school graduates to enroll in college as a means of deferring entry into the job market, forcing more displaced workers to return to school to learn new skills, and enticing growing numbers university students to “drop down” from four-year to two-year programs as a way of reducing expenses and the long-term burden of college debt.

Total enrollment has exploded from 6.8 million to 8 million between 2006 and 2009 and applications for 2010 are likely to surpass those in 2009 to reach a new record. Unfortunately, this may be too much of a good thing. Unless something dramatic is done, the rapid growth of community colleges may well contain the seeds of the system’s destruction.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Community/Other Colleges, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Occupational Opportunities for the Next Decade

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

In my June 27 blog, Payoffs of a College Education, I discussed that the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) 2010 Occupational Outlook Handbook portrays particularly strong growth in jobs for college graduates. These jobs will grow at a faster rate (15% versus 10%) than those that typically require less education and yield higher weekly and lifetime earnings and greater job security. In fact, every step up the educational ladder, from high school diploma, through some college, bachelor degree and professional degree (with a small exception for PhDs), tends to improve virtually every aspect of a person’s career path.

But the level of educational obtainment is a pretty high-level view of the job market. Although it does emphasize the value of graduating from college, it does not, in and of itself, provide much guidance as to which occupations offer the best employment opportunities, the highest earnings potential and the best opportunities for advancement.

Tomorrow’s Largest Growth Occupations

In 2006 (the study’s benchmark year), about half of all jobs (see Chart 3 of the handbook) in college-level occupations were concentrated in three broad categories—education (21%), healthcare (14%) and computers (13%). Adding two others, management (12%) and business and financial operations (11%) covers more than 70% of all college-level jobs.

A nice start, but still too macro a view to provide meaningful help in career planning. Medical jobs, for example, run the gamut from physician assistants to surgeons. Management jobs run from education administrators to CEOs. Jobs within each category have very different educational requirements (from bachelor or below through post-graduate) and are likely to produce vastly differing numbers of total job openings through 2018 (from 66,000 physician assistants to 1 million registered nurses) and growth rates (2% for CEOs to 50% or more for some IT jobs).

The tables supporting the Bureau’s conclusions provide details for multiple occupations in each of these categories. As one would expect, the greatest number of projected openings are concentrated in the three largest college-level job categories: education, healthcare and computers. The first two categories share a few similarities.

Both, for example, are:

  • Being driven largely by population growth and demographic trends;
  • Characterized by especially strong growth in one very big class of occupations;
  • Consist of a large number of moderate and relatively low-paying jobs, and more modest numbers of higher-paying (especially in healthcare) jobs that typically require a minimum of four years of graduate school.

Health care growth, for example, is driven overwhelmingly by the growth in need for RNs, which is projected to grow at a 24% rate and account for almost two-thirds of all listed healthcare openings. Although there will be big needs for teachers at all levels, the demand for K-2 teachers is growing at only a 10.8% rate, while that for post-secondary teachers (and some small specialty teachers) is tracking at 23%.

IT Professions

IT-related job trends are very different. First, although the handbook profiles only five distinct occupations (out of ten that BLS specifically tracks), all four of the specialized, high-skill occupations (network systems and data communications analysts, computer software engineers, systems analysts, and network and systems administrators) are slated for hyper-growth through 2018, at rates ranging from 28% to 53%.

These jobs, most of which require “only” bachelor’s degrees, also provide some of the highest salaries—more than twice the median for all occupations. Many, even during the depths of the recession, are already characterized by strong levels of college hiring, rising salaries and shortages of qualified applicants at all levels of experience.

Moreover, the need for IT skills is being driven not by demographics, but by the rapid, increasingly critical need to incorporate IT into virtually every business, every process and every “machine” (from PDAs and televisions through office buildings and jumbo jets). And this is just the start. Business decisions increasingly require real-time analytics and seamless, real-time collaboration tools. The Internet, meanwhile, is creating new businesses and new job requirements every minute of every day.

This being said, not all IT jobs are created equal. As I mentioned, four of the five listed categories are growing at hyper-rates. The number of openings for the fifth—computer programmers—is actually declining. This is not at all surprising. The demand for the lowest skill IT occupation, data entry clerks, has been plummeting for years. BLS now anticipates similar (albeit slower) declines in the number of openings for computer programmers. These positions, as I’ve discussed in a number of previous blogs, will be increasingly replaced—and compensation reduced—by a combination of:

  • Technology, including more automated development and test processes, software reuse and tools that can be used by non-IT professionals; and by the
  • Rapid growth in the availability and use of lower-priced, offshore IT professionals.

Moreover, while these forces are initially felt in relatively low-skill IT professions, they are already beginning to be felt in ever more demanding occupations. Increasingly sophisticated, policy-based IT management software, remote diagnostic tools and a growing trend toward the delivery of IT as an outsourced service will slash the number of people required to maintain an application, manage a given number of servers or support a given number of users. Moreover, as I have discussed in previous blogs, the number of offshore IT professionals is exploding, their education and training is getting much better and they are moving rapidly up the IT value chain, providing increasingly sophisticated services—including services that integrate IT skills into other college-level occupations.

So, while highly demanding technical specialties may offer promising opportunities for the next decade, IT professionals, like sharks, must continually move forward—or they will die. They must continually evolve their skills to address the most promising career opportunities. Most importantly, they must learn to apply these skills in ways that deliver not just “IT value”, but true “business value” to their company’s line-of-business constituents and especially their customers.

But as the number of opportunities for dedicated IT professionals is large and rapidly growing, this does not even scratch the surface of the need for IT skills in tomorrow’s job market. Virtually every college-level job in America is becoming, to one extent or another, an IT job.

This is not to say they must develop, manage and maintain their company’s IT infrastructure or applications. They must, however, be able to integrate a broad range of increasingly sophisticated IT tools into every aspect of their work. And I don’t mean that people must use word processing and email. Those are yesterday’s skills. Today’s professionals must also be fluent in Internet search, in computer-based collaboration and in social networking. Tomorrow’s professionals must seamlessly incorporate sophisticated information access and analytics tools into their day-to-day tasks and learn dozens of new tools and techniques that most of us can barely identify.

Over the next decade, virtually every professional will have to be an IT professional, as well as a professional in his or her own specific field.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Community/Other Colleges, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Is College Still the Best Road to the American Dream?

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

My June 27 blog examined some of the high-level findings of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently released Occupational Outlook Handbook. Among the primary findings—university graduates have much better employment prospects, earn significantly higher weekly and lifetime earnings and suffer much lower unemployment rates than those with without these degrees.

The blog ended with the question: Given the economic advantages of higher education, why would anyone not get a college, or even graduate degree? This blog briefly reviews some of the reasons.

It is sad do say, but some people are simply not up to higher education. A good portion of those that are, are either too turned off by their experiences in primary and secondary schools, or have not received the type of education that will allow them to continue. This is prompting many educators and foundations, including the Gates Foundation, to look to community colleges as the lynchpin to improving higher education.

Although I will specifically discuss community colleges in future blogs, let’s focus on some of the reasons people do not, cannot or should not go to four-year universities.

The Cost Equation

One of the first and most frequently cited arguments against universities is the cost. According to BLS, college tuition and fees have soared 92% since 2000—almost double the pace of healthcare. And the rate of increase has accelerated thanks to the Great Recession, as the value of university endowments and government funding has plummeted. Tuition at some private universities now exceed $40,000 annually and even some state universities now charge more than $10,000. By the time you add in room and board, costs can exceed $50,000 per year for private universities and $20,000 for public universities. And this does not even begin to account for the opportunity costs associated with going to college—much less graduate school—of 4-10 years of earnings that students forgo while in school.

These costs are making it all but impossible for lower-income families to foot the bill, unless their children qualify for very generous scholarships or find particularly remunerative part-time and summer jobs.

Without even getting into the ways in which escalating education costs are likely to exacerbate already high levels of income inequality, these costs are throwing many students into debt, before they even get a chance to begin their careers. Statistics compiled by Credit.com show that students graduate from college with an average of $20,000 in student loan debt, plus an additional $4,100 in credit card debt. And then there’s graduate school. According to the AMA, 87% of medical students graduate carrying educational loans and graduate with an average of $156,456 of debt.

Starting out with high levels of debt is bad enough. But if these students have the misfortune of graduating into a deep recession, they may not be able to find a job that will allow them to pay off the debt. Or if they do find a job, it is likely to be a minimum wage position that has little to do with their chosen field, and may make it difficult to ever get onto a true career ladder. Even the lucky graduates, who do get jobs in their field, often must settle for lower-level positions and lower salaries. A study by Yale of Management economist Lisa Kahn, for example, found that new graduates who join a company during a recession (1981 for her study) not only start at lower wages, but generally continue to earn lower wages and find it difficult to compete with younger, more recent graduates when normal hiring patterns resume.

Education Quality Compromises

That is for those who graduate. The sad fact, according to Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, is that while the U.S. sends a higher percentage of high school graduates to college than any other OECD country, it is second to last—ahead of only Italy—in graduating these students. About half of all students who enroll in four-year universities—and two-thirds of those in two-year colleges—do not graduate at all. They forego income, pay tuition and room and board for 1, 2 or 3 years and never earn a degree. And, according to the William Bowen and Michael MacPhearson book, Crossing the Finish Line, this drop-out rate is even higher for lower-income students. And since college drop-outs typically earn 30% less ($33,000 compared with $47,000) than do grads, they are unlikely to recover much of their investment.

And this does not even consider one of the central premises of the Bowen/MacPhearson book, that many colleges—and especially many of those attended by highly-qualified lower-income students—do a better job in “producing dropouts” than in educating and graduating students. Education quality—not to speak of availability—is likely to further decline as a result of the state funding cuts, college endowment losses and alumni contribution shortfalls engendered by the recession.

University of California budget cuts, for example, are forcing schools to increase tuition by 32%, lay off and cut salary of faculty and staff, cut programs and classes, increase class sizes. California State University, meanwhile, is being forced to stop accepting applications for the 2010 spring term and cut total system-wide enrollment by 40,000 students over the next year. Students who are already enrolled are finding it increasingly difficult to get into oversubscribed classes that are required to meet graduation and major requirements.

Some prospective students, especially those from lower-income families, are being foreclosed from higher education altogether. Those can afford the cost will find it more difficult to get required classes and may have to postpone graduation. Meanwhile, the limited availability of jobs is prompting many who would not otherwise seek higher education to go back to school. Dropout rates can be expected to increase over the next few years and more students will graduate with more debt.

The Education-Job Market Disconnect

What is a new high-school or college graduate to do? With jobs scarce—especially for young adults—graduates are increasingly choosing to go back to school. Schools, however, are cutting back on the number of students they can accept, increasing tuitions and reducing course offerings.

A relative handful of students will get into (and be able to pay for) the best schools, major in the fields most likely to qualify them for attractive, well-paying jobs and graduate into a robust economy that will value and pay for their skills. The vast majority, however, face less attractive options. They can:

  • Skip higher education and possibly relegate themselves to a life of less desirable, low-paying, low-security jobs; or
  • Go to school (if they can afford it), accumulate more debt and risk graduating into a still slow economy.

Luckily there are more attractive alternatives to each of these fates:

  • A number rapidly growing fields, in industries including health care and higher education, still offer attractive, relatively well-paying jobs that do not require bachelor degrees (some registered nurse positions, insurance agents, police, medical assistants, etc.) or to a lesser extent, even associate degrees (cooks, welders, truck drivers, carpenters, etc.). In fact, of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate, only 7 typically require a four-year degree;
  • Those who do go to college or graduate school can pursue fields of study, especially in finance, accounting and STEM-related disciplines (science, technology, engineering, math) that lead to jobs which companies currently have trouble filling and are expected to produce large numbers of well-paying jobs in the future (physicians, pharmacists, post-secondary teachers, software engineers, accountants, etc.).

My next blog post will drill down into findings for some of these bachelor-and-above-level jobs, examining categories and specific jobs which offer the best employment opportunities, the highest earnings potential and ideally, good opportunities for intellectual and psychic fulfillment.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Job and Career Opportunities, Societal Forces, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 2 Responses »
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Payoffs of a College Education

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

Last month, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the 2010 version of its bi-annual Occupational Outlook Handbook. This information-packed compendium outlines the state of the U.S. labor market and draws on reams of data and expert opinion to project long-term (through 2018) growth prospects for about 300 distinct occupations. It examines likely growth and declines in the job prospects, how each job is likely to change, the types of education that will best prepare people for these jobs, how much these jobs typically pay, the degree of competition one may face in seeking a specific job and even how best to find and win these positions.

Not to oversell the value of this data, BLS issues all the necessary caveats. The most important are that it is examining long-term trends and that findings are subject to uncertainties inherent in any effort to anticipate, much less quantify the future. Most importantly, it recognizes that unanticipated shocks, such as a global Great Recession, the collapse in the value of a world currency, a major terrorist attack or the implications of an unprecedented environmental disaster could delay or totally derail any such projections. Who, for example could have predicted that when a freshman entered college during the boom years of the mid 2000’s, the world would be mired in the worst recession since the great depression and that newly minted graduates would face the highest unemployment rates since the Depression?

Despite the caveats and uncertainties, the Handbook contains reams of fascinating information which is necessary reading for anybody that is even thinking about working over the next decade. Not just students who are now entering school or graduates attempting to enter the workforce, but virtually anybody who might consider the prospect of changing jobs, or who might be laid off any time over the next decade.

The Lifetime Advantages of Education

Given the value of this information, my next few blogs will examine some of what I consider the most important trends for occupations that typically require a four-year college degree or higher. I am not even going to touch upon the voluminous sections that focus on jobs that typically require only high-school, or what the BLS considers “mixed” educations (those that require some education beyond high school, but less than a bachelor degree).

Why focus exclusively on occupations that typically require bachelor’s, and increasingly, graduate degrees? Chart 2 of the report explains this far more succinctly and poignantly than I ever could. As it shows, every additional level of educational attainment, from less than a high school diploma through professional degree, yields progressively higher, stair-step-like increases in average weekly earnings (from $419 per week to $1,441 in 2006 dollars), lifetime earnings and progressively lower prospects for unemployment. (One interesting anomaly is that those with doctoral degrees tend to earn slightly less money and have slightly higher unemployment rates than do those with professional degrees, albeit still significantly better than those with master’s degrees.)

Although the 2006 year benchmark for the BLS data portrays unemployment rates that appear almost ludicrously low in the current environment (6.8% for less than high school through about 1.5% for bachelor’s and above), the pattern holds—although the differences are just as dramatic, and much more depressing—in 2010. As shown in the BLS’s May 2010 unemployment ratings, these figures are now 15% and 4.7%).

Just as important as the job security and earnings potential attributable to higher levels of education, occupations that require a bachelor’s degree or higher have in the past— and will continue to enjoy—higher growth rates (15% compared with an average of 10%) than occupations with lower educational requirements. And most importantly to many, higher education levels are more likely to give one more flexibility in selecting (at least in normal economic times) the type of work they would like to do and result in more intellectually stimulating and psychically rewarding careers. This does not even begin to account for the non-job-related benefits of college, such as improved health, civic involvement and aesthetic appreciation.

So far, it sounds like a slam dunk. The more education, the better, more lucrative and secure the career. A number of people have gotten the message. According to a Census Bureau survey, the percentage of U.S. workers (defined for this purpose as employed people between 16 and 44 years of age) with college degrees has doubled over the last three decades and the percentage of high-school graduates who are enrolling in colleges and universities has reached an all time high of 70 percent.

The bad news is that this still represents less than 30% of workers (although another 22% has completed at least some level of college, including Associate degrees). In other words, half of all these working adults still have only 12 or fewer years of education at a time when many employment experts agree that all employees should have at least two years of post-high-school education.

Given the economic advantages of higher education, why would anyone not get a college, or even graduate degree?

I will briefly discuss this issue in my next blog (July11). I’ll then shift back to the college-level job data, drilling down into those bachelor-and-above-level occupations that offer the best employment opportunities, the highest earnings potential and the greatest opportunities for intellectual, and ideally psychic fulfillment.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Job and Career Opportunities, Societal Forces, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 2 Responses »
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Addressing HP’s Industry Solutions Talent Gap

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

This blog is an overview of the findings of my new report (hot link to offering page) in which I examine the talent requirements and recruitment and development efforts that will underlie HP’s effort to develop the type of more industry-focused value propositions and service-led go-to-market approaches discussed in my previous blog and report, both titled “HP Goes Vertical”.

My “HP Goes Vertical” blog, describes how Hewlett-Packard is likely to use EDS as a vehicle for gradually transforming the company’s entire enterprise IT operations:

  • From a horizontally-focused, engineering-centric IT products and solutions company;
  • To a consultative, industry-focused solutions company that helps customers envision and apply IT as a solution to pressing business needs.

This transformation will entail an equally momentous change in the company’s need for talent. It will have to retain tens of thousands of current employees, hire thousands of new people and radically change how it trains, goals and compensates these people. These changes are likely to forever alter a corporate culture that has been 44 years in the making.

Transformation to a Services-led Workforce

Selling horizontally-focused IT product and solutions requires a deep knowledge of product capabilities and competitive differentiators as well as how modernized, efficient IT infrastructures can improve performance and reduce costs. Designing, implementing and managing these solutions require not only deep technical skills and experience, but also change management and some level of cultural skills.

Although the sale, design, implementation and management of industry-specific business solutions certainly require similar capabilities, they require much more. While technical skills remain at the center of an IT solutions engagement, these skills tend to take a back seat to deep industry and business process skills in a business solutions engagement.

Rather than leading with product capabilities and TCO, business solutions account executives typically enter accounts with well-defined points-of-view as to how the customer’s specific industry is changing and the requirements for success relative to new market, competitive and extrinsic conditions. Just as importantly, they must be able to engage in these conversations not just with the types of IT executives with whom most IT companies are used to working, but also with senior business executives.

These industry-specific solutions perspectives, however, cannot stop at the sales level. They must be infused throughout the organizations, through people that architect, build and support industry-specific solutions, and through those who define and prioritize target markets and identify and communicate compelling value propositions.

A small percentage of HP’s senior sales people and consultants (especially in CME and financial services) had such capabilities. They are, however, in a small minority. EDS had more—although not to the level of competitors like IBM or Accenture.

Enterprise Services as HP’s Business Solutions Incubator

The combined HP/EDS company has already begun to marshal its best business solutions-based talent across all groups, identify those industry segments in which it has the strongest capabilities and most compelling value propositions, and identify and assign the best qualified salespeople to the most promising accounts in each of these segments.

Although HP has some such talent in all parts of its Enterprise Business Group (not to speak of in its Imaging and Printing and Personal Systems Groups), the vast majority of such capabilities reside in the company’s Enterprise Services team, which houses most of the EDS business and people.

Given this, I believe HP will use this organization—particularly its sales and service delivery arms—as the company’s Business Solutions Incubator. This incubator would:

  • Create, market, sell and support the company’s initial service-led industry solutions;
  • Identify and disseminate consistent, repeatable best practices that could be applied across all industry groups; and most importantly
  • Develop the people most capable of architecting, building, selling and supporting them and then, disseminate best practices and people out through other parts of the organization.

Among this group’s primary talent development responsibilities would be to:

  • Define the type of talent it will need—especially across its service sales and service delivery teams;
  • Identify current employees that are most capable of filling key roles and create accelerated development and mentorship programs to help develop their skills;
  • Determine the talent—both new graduates and people with experience in other companies—that it must recruit from the outside; and
  • Restructure sales and service delivery career paths, metrics, incentives and compensation structures to create a large supply of such people.

Once it begins to “incubate” a critical mass of such professionals within the company’s services sales and service delivery arms, it must rapidly disseminate this talent out through all parts of the HP Enterprise Business organization—initially Software and Technology Services and ultimately Hardware. Once the group is on track to accomplish all this for the company’s initially targeted industries, it would probably lead the process of identifying and prioritizing HP’s move into additional verticals and sub-verticals.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, Hewlett-Packard, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Vertical Strategies, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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