Job and Career Opportunities

...now browsing by category

 

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 »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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 »
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

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 »
Tags: , , , ,

How IBM is Helping Entrepreneurs Build a Smarter Planet

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

IBM, like all other large IT vendors, has many types of programs to help small software companies build solutions atop the vendor’s infrastructure. These programs range from:

  • Huge “breadth programs”, such as Software Group’s PartnerWorld ISV & Developer Relations program, which provides technical and marketing support to thousands of ISVs of all shapes and sizes; to
  • Highly-focused “depth programs”, such as that of its Venture Capital Group, which builds strategic partnerships to help VCs identify and nurture portfolio companies that can deliver particular value to the IBM ecosystem.

The company’s new Global Entrepreneur Initiative is intended to combine benefits of both. The initiative, which was announced in Bangalore at IBM’s annual Venture Partnering Symposium, is intended to “help entrepreneurs gain the skills they need to bring new ideas to market faster using IBM technology to accelerate industry transformation and fuel innovation.”

This effort casts a wide net to identify particularly promising start-ups that, while not having hit VC’s radar screens, have the potential of significantly advancing IBM’s Smarter Planet initiatives in specific segments. Once it identifies these companies, it will provide them with a broad range of the type of deep support capabilities intended to accelerate their development and deepen their relationships with IBM. But while this initiative is different from those of the above mentioned efforts, it is linked directly to both. It, for example, was launched by IBM’s Venture Capital Group and is intended to bring promising start-ups to the attention of the company’s VC partners. Much of the support, meanwhile, will be provided by IBM’s ISV & Developer Relations Group.

Looking for a Few Good Smarter Planet Entrepreneurs

The criteria for participation in the initiative are broad. Candidates must:

  • Be privately-held;
  • Have been in business less than three years;
  • Be actively developing software aligned to IBM’s Smarter Planet focus areas; and
  • Develop their solution on the IBM software platform.

Qualification for admittance, however, is rigorous and selective. The solution, for example, must not simply be “aligned” with, but must offer “transformative opportunities” around Smarter Planet. The company must be judged to have a “competitive opportunity to survive in the market” and its solution must have the potential to “provide real value to customers”.

This, however, is only the first cut. Those start-ups who qualify are invited to participate in one of what IBM expects to be a minimum of seven SmartCamps that will be held in different countries over the next six months. These camps are networking and mentoring events that bring start-ups together with appropriate IBMers, VC and university partners and differing combinations of 19 global industry and technology associations in the host country. These associations include TiE Silicon Valley and the Mass Tech Leadership Council in the U.S.; the National Consortium of University Entrepreneurs and SE Business Innovation & Growth and Enterprise UK in the United Kingdom; The Israeli Venture Association and SvoiBiz in Israel; TiE, and the Indian Angel Network in India and Journees de L’entrepreneur and ADEN in France.

While IBM and partner representatives will help all participating start-ups assess and tune their messages and business plans, they will also serve as judges for the next stage of the qualification process—a competition in which each of roughly 20 to 30 qualifying start-ups presents its Smarter Planet value proposition and business plan. While each SmartCamp will produce a single winner, all finalists will be admitted to the program.

Although thousands of start-ups will apply for the program, IBM expects that no more than 10-20% will be admitted. The total is likely to consist of “a couple of hundred companies, not a couple of thousand”.

Membership Has its Privileges

Those who qualify enter a three-month mentorship program in which IBM will help them build their business plans, optimize their architectures and develop joint value propositions. Each start-up will have access to a custom-designed package that combines:

  • Free access to IBM’s software portfolio and relevant industry frameworks (such as for Smarter Water, Smarter Buildings and Smarter Health Care) through a cloud computing environment;
  • Technical architecture support through access to IBM software engineers and scientists, product development assistance from dedicated IBM project managers and access to the 8 million developers in IBM’s developerWorks program;
  • Business plan mentoring, industry insight, marketing support and go-to-market assistance, both directly from IBM and its full network of partners, including academics, industry experts and government leaders;
  • Improved visibility among, access to and potential for funding from IBM’s VC partners; and
  • Credibility among and IBM’s help in accessing IBM customers.

Much of this assistance will be coordinated by IBM’s ISV & Developer Relations Group, and delivered though its global Innovation Center network. The company’s new Global Entrepreneur partners, however, will have access to more personalized, programmatic and deeper access to more services than are available through other IBM’s other developer programs.

It is too soon to assess the number of partners IBM’s new Global Entrepreneur program will ultimately produce, and how many of these companies will yield the type of transformative Smart Planet business that IBM seeks. The program, however, is generating interest, with more than 200 applicants in the first 30 days since the program was announced.

Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, IBM, Innovation/Entrepeneur, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Trends, Job and Career Opportunities | No Responses »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

IBM’s Plan to Transform University IT Education And Spur Student Enthusiasm in the Process—Summary

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

This week’s blog is an overview of the findings of my new report, “IBM’s Plan to Transform University IT Education: And Spur Student Enthusiasm in the Process” in which I examine how IBM’s university alliances have evolved to emphasize education in areas that transcend IT skills, and the long-term benefits that IBM is likely to derive from this approach.

IBM started its Academic Initiative in the 1950s when it helped universities create Information Science programs. It extended this program around specific IT and engineering skills and then, in 2003 added a Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) initiative.

This SSME initiative went way beyond the university efforts of IBM—as well as most other vendors—that traditionally focused on “hard” science and technology skills, such as around programming, database design, electrical engineering and physics. SSME, in contrast, emphasizes the needs for universities to encourage multi-disciplinary education and the need to develop T-shaped skills, which combine deep skills in one or more fields, plus a high-level understanding across many others. IBM worked with universities to help professors expand the focus of their own courses and departmental curricula and, most importantly, to coordinate curricula across multiple schools within a university.

It, for example, encouraged and helped schools refocus engineering education around real-world problems and train engineers to work in multi-disciplinary teams. It also challenged business schools to evolve their traditional focus on management of manufacturing companies (which now accounts for less than 20% of developed-country economies) to developing a similarly rigorous management science around services (which already account for about 60%). Some 40 universities have are going further, creating truly integrated curricula that cross traditionally sacrosanct boundaries—integrating courses across schools including management, information science, engineering and social science. A few have even begun offering new cross-school degree programs around SSME-related themes.

Smarter Planet—Using SSME to Change the World

IBM’s huge, corporate-wide Smarter Planet initiative is, in many ways, the application of SSME to critical, real-world problems. SSME, after all, is an effort to create a science around decomposing and recomposing service-based processes, optimizing service supply chains and value chains and creating interdisciplinary research centers to design and optimize complex “service systems”—combinations of people, organizational networks and technologies that are aligned around a specific objective, such as designing and managing more livable cities, more effective healthcare systems and more efficient energy networks.

This effectively transforms SSME from an academic discipline into an instrument for addressing societal needs. It provides universities with the tools required to create education tracks and, eventually, degree programs around social goals—thereby attracting and making it easier for students who want to “change the world”. Moreover, IBM’s efforts to help shape educational curricula across Smarter Planet initiatives now transcends traditional information science, engineering and business schools to reach into areas including mathematics, architecture, healthcare management, public service, urban studies, and others.

Although such programs may not attract those students who are driven to become hedge fund managers or musicians, they do have the potential of attracting and providing “employment-ready” educations for millions of other students with similarly strong drives in other fields.

Engineering a Path to an IBM Job

Virtually all corporate university education programs share a common goal—to facilitate the education of students with the skills and perspective required to address the talent needs of the sponsor corporation, its customers and its partners. It’s easy to see the direct benefit that IBM can gain from programs that teach System z mainframe skills, that Intel can gain from multi-core architecture design programs or that Wal-Mart can derive from the University of Arkansas’ supply-chain optimization program.

But what benefits will IBM gain from encouraging universities to launch broad, non-vendor specific programs like SSME, healthcare management and transportation system design? The company’s logo isn’t on or necessarily associated with these programs, nor is IBM the first place most newly-minted graduates would look for a job to solve world hunger—unless, perhaps, you know about IBM’s Smarter Food program and its projects to increase agricultural yields, improve sustainability, reduce waste through the optimization of supply chains and improve food inspection processes.

That’s where some of IBM’s multiple university outreach programs fit in. The company has 4,000 University Ambassadors, typically IBM domain experts, who volunteer to work with universities to engage with faculty members, develop classes around real-world problems, deliver guest lectures, participate in seminars and otherwise engage with professors and students. The company also provides education tools, such as its INNOV8 Business Process Modeling (BPM) simulation game and is adapting many of its other courses to new learning methods, as through support of community portals and wikis, discussion forums, blogs, and Facebook and Twitter communities.

It also has an active university research program through which it funds professors and graduate students to conduct specialized research and all types of fellowship and internship programs in which it works with professors to identify high-potential students. It also partners with universities on IBM’s annual Battle of the Brains competition, the most recent of which attracted more than 28,000 students from 2,000 universities worldwide. These competitions engage interdisciplinary teams to tackle real world problems. The theme of these competitions? Would you guess they are typically aligned around one of IBM’s 21 (and growing) Smarter Planet themes?

IBM will certainly not attract or hire all of the graduates from SSME and Smarter Planet-theme programs. Nor does it want to. Although it hopes, and is positioning itself to identify and recruit some of the most talented graduates, its ultimate objective is to seed the world—its businesses, governments, NGOs and universities—with people who think about the world’s needs (and solutions) in much the same way that IBM does, who have been touched by IBM Ambassadors and programs, who understand IBM products, and who recognize that IBM is dedicated to addressing the same types of needs as are they.

This all leaves me with two questions. When will other corporations recognize the long-term payoffs of this broader approach to partnering with universities? And, how will they reach professors and students in the myriad fields that will be increasingly reshaped and redefined by IT?

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IBM, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Intel’s K-12 Education Programs

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

Although microprocessors are certainly Intel’s most important product, education is, by far, its most important charitable endeavor. Intel directly contributes approximately $70 million per year to funding a broad range of educational endeavors—and this number does not even include the roughly $30 million of grants provided by the Intel Foundation.

These educational programs, all of which are managed primarily through Intel’s Corporate Affairs Department, are divided into three broad buckets:

  • The Intel World Ahead Program is Intel’s comprehensive program for supporting global education markets with it’s products, services and philanthropic programs. This program dedicates resources to connecting the next billion people, in all corners of the world, to technology tools. Although it entails a broad range of efforts, including providing access to IT and communications tools and the providing of localized content and services, education is a primary component. The educational objectives of this program include—and leverage—the same resources as the company’s Higher Education and K-12 programs.
  • The Intel Higher Education Program focuses primarily on developing and promoting specialized technical curricula, research, and competitions in areas including microelectronic, multi-core and mobile technology design, and parallel computing architectures. It also partners with the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business to encourage and prepare today’s students to become technology entrepreneurs. Both efforts are intended to encourage and develop the type of talent pipeline required by Intel, its partners and its customers.
  • The K-12 Education Program focuses on helping schools and teachers to use IT to transform education, to encourage students to study and excel in math and science and, more generally, to facilitate the type of critical thinking and the analytical and collaborative skills required in a knowledge economy. These efforts include a range of project-based learning approaches, online education tools, and the Intel Teach professional development program. They are supported by a number of complementary community-based programs, such as the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network, the Intel Learn Program and the Intel Science Talent Search that allows children to access IT-based schools and develop new skills and interests outside classroom settings.

The Foundations of Intel Teach

Intel Teach is the centerpiece of Intel’s K-12 educational efforts. Teach is a professional development program that provides educators with the type of online tools and training that will allow them to effectively employ technology to transform their lesson plans and grading methodologies, develop professional learning communities and expose their learnings to their peers. The program is intended to facilitate the use of project-based approaches to help students learn high-order,  21st-century skills in areas including problem solving, critical thinking and communications.

Although Intel, like many other IT companies, began its educational program by donating hardware and software to schools, it soon recognized that transforming established educational paradigms and teaching models requires much more than products. It requires a comprehensive enablement program though which teachers learn to effectively use technology to improve their own productivity and to integrate it through their teaching and assessment processes.

This led creation of Intel’s ACE (Applying Computers in Education) program, under which Intel trains teachers on the effective use of computers and on computer-enabled learning methods. Although the program ramped from training 300 teachers in 1997 to training 2,500 in 1998, then-CEO Craig Barrett was not impressed. He set a goal of training a minimum of 100,000 teachers and backed that commitment with a big investment.

In response to this challenge, the Corporate Affairs Department transformed ACE into its new Intel Teach program. This program, which was launched in the U.S. and rapidly spread it to other (initially English-speaking) countries, consisted of a number of modules (Essentials, Elements, Thinking with Technology, and so forth) among which educators could choose one or many.

Between 1998 and 2002 Intel trained a total of 1 million teachers in 25 countries. Although the tech industry crash slowed momentum, Intel Teach is now offered in more than 50 countries and has trained over 7 million teachers.

Although the Intel Teach program is created and managed centrally, Intel recognizes that one size does not fit all. The program is, therefore, managed locally and implementations are tailored to the very different needs and requirements of individual states and countries, Intel conducts conferences for state education policy leaders and helps them understand how technology can help them address their specific objectives. It can then assist these government organizations identify the types of efforts best suited to their needs and help them select districts and schools in with which these efforts can most effectively be developed.

Intel does not work directly with schools or train individual teachers. Instead, it recruits and trains NGOs and professional educational content developers, who then apply Intel Teach methodologies and tools to the training of individual teachers. It also works to assure that its objectives and approaches are aligned with groups such as the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), that promote the role of technology in education.

Intel also coordinates some of its Teach efforts with the education programs of some of its IT vendor partners—especially Microsoft and Cisco—to develop best-in-class models for deploying technology in education. Although the partners’ objectives and approaches sometimes diverge (such as in Intel’s covering of MacOS and Linux, in addition to Windows), their efforts, technology focuses and capabilities are still quite complementary. (See, for example, my March 28 and April 4 blogs of Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program.) Intel, for example, provides basic Word and Excel training and positions Microsoft’s peer mentoring courses as follow-ons to its own Essentials and Elements courses.

I’ll discuss the objectives and results of Intel’s Teach program in next week’s blog.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, Intel, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, Job and Career Opportunities, K-12, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | No Responses »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Great U.S. Tech Education Debate

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

On March 15, TechCrunch produced a very informative debate between Craig Barrett, former CEO of Intel and huge proponent of technology education, and Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke/UC-Berkeley professor who writes extensively on innovation, entrepreneurship and cross-border movement of technology talent. 

The debate was spawned by a Wadhwa comments in a Scientific American article that claimed there is no shortage of tech talent in the U.S. To summarize a debate, which must be read in its entirety to be fully understood, Wadhwa claims there is plenty of talent in the form of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) talent in this country. The problem is that much of this talent is in the form of postdocs (post-doctoral fellows) that are bottled up in a broken university technology education system, and in foreign-born PhDs who, once they receive degrees from U.S. universities, find it increasingly difficult or unattractive to remain in the U.S. If the artificial economic and political restraints were removed, and STEM PhDs were actually paid what they were worth, this talent would be unleashed and produce the type of innovation and jobs that the U.S. so desperately needs.

Barrett views things differently. Although he acknowledges that some postdoc PhD’s do not achieve their commercial market potential, he claims that this is due to their decisions to dedicate their efforts to the long, uncertain process of becoming tenured professors at research universities, rather than working at corporations. In his view, the real problem lies in our K-12 education system, which, due largely to the lack of qualified science and mathematics teachers, fails to ignite children’s’ imaginations around the opportunities in these disciplines and fails to provide a foundational knowledge for university study.

Wadhwa certainly acknowledges the limitations in the U.S. K-12 education system and the need to create “excitement about science and engineering at the national level and motivate our best and brightest to become engineers and scientists.” He, however, clams that the biggest problem is pay. The scientific community in general and the educational system in particular, simply do not pay enough to retain the best talent. These people are lured by the huge the huge rewards promised by the financial industry (such as becoming venture capitalists or investment bank “quants “), rather than become research scientists who drive U.S. innovation.

My Interpretation

While the debate is fascinating, it appears to me that Wadhwa over-generalizes the admittedly disturbing dilemma of postdocs. Just because some STEM PhDs remain in poorly paid fellowships (with hopes of earning valued professorships) rather than going to industry, it does not necessarily mean either that:

  • There are not enough jobs for STEM graduates; or that
  • STEM professions do not pay competitively.

True, not all STEM PhDs can become professors at prestigious research universities. On other hand, not all law school graduates can win U.S. Supreme Court clerkships or highly paid posts at premier white shoe law firms. That, however, does not stop students from overwhelming law school admissions offices. Nor do the short odds of becoming professional athletes, actors or musicians prevent millions of young adults from aspiring to these careers.

Even if there are not enough tenured professorships, PhDs who do need jobs can always “stoop” to work in the private sector. Nor should we confine the analysis of STEM jobs to PhDs. There are, after all, far more Bachelor and Master-level STEM graduates than there are PhDs. Most statistics show that newly minted STEM graduates have higher employment rates than other job categories (even during the recession) and that by far, the largest percentage of unfilled jobs utilize STEM-related skills. Moreover, starting salaries for these graduates remain among the highest of those for all degrees. As shown in a March 2010 Association of Colleges and Employers study, for example, engineering and IT jobs account for all ten of the top ten earning degrees. 

Although some segments of the financial services industry certainly pay more for a handful of the best graduates from the best schools, this cannot be viewed as the standard for all STEM jobs—just as Wall Street law firm salaries cannot be viewed as the standards for all JDs from all law schools. These numbers are too small, and their selection criteria too limited to apply to all graduates.

In sum, I generally agree with Craig Barrett that most people—especially young people—are driven as much by their passions as by the immediate opportunities for monetary rewards. There are, however, limits to this idealism. Pay must yield reasonably comfortable lifestyles and must at least be in the same ballpark as reasonably competitive fields. Although most STEM careers probably meet these criteria (except when compared with financial services, professional sports or entertainment), the big exception is in K-12 STEM education.

Unfortunately, it will take much more than competitive salaries to fix this country’s K-12 education system. Its problems are far too complex and ingrained to be solved by the education community alone. As I have discussed in many of my articles, solving these problems will require a huge amount of assistance from the private sector.

A number of private sector companies—especially IT companies, like Intel, Microsoft and IBM—are already doing great work in helping to improve education at all levels, from K through graduate schools. They are giving schools some of the tools and the training required to improve teaching and learning and helping them improve STEM curricula.

Some are even attempting to address the intense social and peer pressures against becoming “geeks” and “nerds” by demonstrating that STEM skills can be instrumental in achieving the goals of many young adults—to make a real difference in the world. As discussed in my report on IBM’s Academic Initiative, IBM is doing particularly interesting work in engaging student’s desire to make a difference in the world by showing how STEM skills are so critical to addressing some of society’s most pressing problems, as around smarter healthcare, energy and food supplies.

With all due respect to Intel’s wonderful commercials, it may be too much to hope to persuade kids to view scientists, engineers and mathematicians with the same admiration and awe as rock stars or professional athletes. It may, however, be possible to engage at least some part of their minds, psyches and self esteem around the idea of helping the world solve real problems. Perhaps someday, children focused on such missions may even earn the respect, if not necessarily the admiration, of their peers.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Education System and Institutions, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, K-12, Political Forces, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Economic, Competitive, Social and Political Implications of KPO

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

My last three blogs (The Growth of Knowledge Process Outsourcing, Evalueserve’s KPO Service Offerings, Understanding Evalueserve’s KPO Business) discussed the emergence and rapid growth and evolution of the Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) industry and market. As I discussed, this industry, which was borne of and enabled by the boom in IT Services offshoring, takes the offshoring of services into totally new directions. The most basic of this work extends the IT industry’s experience in outsourcing standardized, structured, rules-based tasks into a number of more broadly defined, less structured and more discretionary functions.

The Evolution of Offshorable Services Jobs

More importantly, just as IT outsourcing progressed up the value chain from ministerial jobs, such as the maintenance of old legacy application into more conceptual work, such as in architecting of distributed Internet-based applications, so too is the outsourcing of a broad range of other “knowledge-based functions”. KPO is rapidly extending the offshoring of knowledge-based services:

  • Beyond jobs that consist of standardized, repeatable processes, are easy to learn and can be readily monitored and tracked (such as application maintenance and call center operator);
  • To those that require analytical (like financial and market analysis), conceptual (like legal research and architectural design) and, in some instances, innovative (scientific research and industrial design) skills. These services are typically less structured and manageable, entail greater discretion and, increasingly, require ongoing coordination with professionals in other countries.

Services Continunium

But to understand the real implications of KPO, you must combine the rapid growth in the type and number of jobs that can be performed offshore, with the:

  • Rapid growth in the number of foreign—and declining number of U.S.—professionals with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) training;
  • New information technology and communications (ITC) capabilities that allow work to be seamlessly performed and transferred across geographies and time zones; and
  • New management and collaboration practices that permit business processes to be componentized and workers from remote locations to seamless collaborate on complex tasks.

The result, as Princeton University’s Alan Blinder concluded in a 2007 study that was corroborated by an independent Harvard Business School study—between 21% and 42% of U.S. jobs have the potential of being outsourced. (Not that they necessarily will be outsourced, but that they are potentially outsourceable.) And, unlike the case with manufacturing jobs before them, the majority of these new positions are knowledge jobs that typically require college degrees.

Opportunities for U.S. Knowledge Workers

What does the growth and changing nature of knowledge outsourcing in general, and KPO in particular, mean for U.S. knowledge workers? Two things:

  • Regardless of whether Blinder and HBS’s numbers are right, the U.S. will undoubtedly lose millions of traditionally secure white collar jobs to offshore providers over the next decade; and
  • Although Indian providers will continue to source many jobs offshore, even they will be hiring American workers as firms including Evalueserve, Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consulting Services open, acquire and expand delivery centers in the United States.

What does all this mean to current and prospective U.S. knowledge workers? As I have discussed in recent posts, the U.S. will always retain millions of existing knowledge jobs and will continue to produce millions of new ones. The difference is that employers will look for very different types of skills than in the past. Those workers that Thomas Friedman calls “the average practitioners”—those people who perform routine tasks and those that wait for work to be handed to them—are becoming an endangered species.

Knowledge workers that hope to qualify for the secure jobs of the future—both in domestic and offshore firms—will require different sets of skills than those of Friedman’s average practitioners. As discussed in my report IT Companies as Catalysts in Creating the 21st Century Workforce (click here to see an excerpt or  here to request a free copy of the full report), these workers must be able to innovate, analyze and communicate. They must increasingly possess a new set of core skills that include:

  • IT, not necessarily in developing and managing IT environments, but in understanding which IT tools are most applicable to a chosen field and how to apply them to deliver business value;
  • Communications, the combination of writing, speaking, presentation (and optionally others, such as multimedia and video) that will be so essential in selling one’s ideas;
  • Internet (to the extent that such skills will not be innate in new-generation workers), which provides all employees complete access to all the information they need and the social networking tools and techniques that will be increasingly required to find allies, build consensus and effectively sell one’s ideas (both within and outside of their organizations); and
  • Mathematics (particularly analytic techniques and supporting capabilities such as statistics, modeling and simulations) to help workers derive true insight from, and develop innovative solutions based on the huge volumes of digital information that are becoming available to all knowledge workers in all disciplines.

People who possess such skills will produce higher value for their employers (whether domestic or foreign), enjoy higher salaries and better job security and will be in greater demand by other companies. Those that lack such skills will suffer the opposite fate

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, IT/Software-as-a-Service, Job and Career Opportunities, Political Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | No Responses »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Understanding Evalueserve’s KPO Business

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

My last two blogs defined and explained the nature and dynamics of the KPO industry and provided a relatively representative overview of range of services provided by profiling the offerings of the industry leader Evalueserve. But understanding the breadth of KPO offerings is one thing. Understanding the business models by which firms operate, the value they provide to clients and the implications for U.S. knowledge workers is something totally different.

Service and Employee Management

Evalueserve was founded in 2000 and now offers eight different KPO offerings (in addition to its Circle of Experts program. Although this type of growth is rapid and challenging, the company times its new offerings carefully (as by not launching a new offering until each current offering has a minimum staff of 100 analysts) to ensure that it maintains critical mass and quality of service in each of these offerings.

This growth has resulted in an employee base of 2,100 people, 1,750 of whom are billable to clients. These billable employees were initially based in India, where the vast majority of continue reside. However, the company has opened three additional delivery centers. Its Chinese and Chilean centers (established in 2005 and 2006) employ about 175 people each and its Romanian center (opened in 2008), an additional 40. Although many of these people have decent levels of domain knowledge and provide some substantive services (such as reviewing and analyzing financial reports), their primary role is to provide local language support and real-time communications with regional clients:

  • China supports clients in Japan, Korea, China and other East-Asian countries;
  • Chile supports Spanish-speaking clients worldwide, although primarily in the Americas; and
  • Romania supports those in Germany, Russia and Eastern Europe.

Who are these billable people? Most are research associates, analysts and managers/team leaders. They average 27 to 28 years old and have 3-to-5 years of post-high school education (at least a bachelors, and usually a masters degree). Although most are fresh out of school, Evalueserve does hire some people with 5 or more years experience as senior analysts or managers. Even though the company assigns each employee a “Career Manager”, many employees leave within 3 years. These employees tend to view Evalueserve not as a permanent home, but as a valuable stepping stone where they can develop the skills and experience that will be required for a career in a large global corporation. Many such employees leave the company to pursue higher education. On the other hand, those who remain after 3 years consider the KPO industry to be their “home” and tend to work in it for a much longer period of time.

Evalueserve has close to 60 professional employees in the U.S. and Western Europe, although they are primarily sales and client relationship managers. Most have consultative sales backgrounds in market research, IT consulting and related services. The company plans to open delivery centers in North America and Europe (see below).

Addressing Client Needs

Evalueserve’s 1,000+ clients range from the largest corporations to modest-size professional service firms and span virtually all industries, from consumer goods to life sciences and manufacturing to media. The vast majority of these clients are from Western Europe (40% of the company’s revenues) and North America (40%), with the remaining 20% spread across Asia and Latin America. While the breadth of its client base is large, 80% of its revenues come from only the top 50 clients and two-thirds is derived from only three industries—banking/financial services, technology and telecom, and healthcare. The vast majority of these clients originally came to Evalueserve for the expected reason—to reduce costs through labor arbitrage—and many of these companies subscribe to only a single service offering and view Evalueserve as a “mere vendor”.

This, however, is beginning to change. A few companies are leveraging existing relationships, such as for market research, into additional services (e.g., business research or marketing support). Meanwhile, some clients are beginning to view the provider as a true business partner, rather than as a vendor. Interestingly, this later trend appears to be determined primarily along departmental lines, rather than by industry or company size. Strategy and intellectual property departments and consulting firms are increasingly viewing Evalueserve as more of a partner whereas financial departments, banks and market research departments still tend to view it primarily as a vendor.

Most clients, however, are beginning to look to KPO for more than labor arbitrage. Some look to it as a vehicle for revenue enhancement, such as by using sales management services to improve sales productivity or by leveraging investment and legal research capabilities to enable banks to cover more companies and law firms to gradually expand into new specializations.

A growing number of U.S. and European clients are also leveraging Evalueserve’s global presence to facilitate expansion into higher growth emerging country markets in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe—using its services to research and evaluate new market opportunities, gain a better understanding of local customers, partners and legal/regulatory requirements and to insure protection of intellectual property. In fact, approximately 15% of Evalueserve’s revenue now comes from researching emerging countries (particularly China and India).

Evalueserve recruits the vast majority of its personnel with skills in providing broad, horizontal, cross-industry services—skills for which the vast majority of its clients retain the company. Having said this, analysts develop industry-specific knowledge through ongoing work with clients and the company now claims that a growing number of its people are developing demonstrable skills in its three core verticals: banking/financial services, technology and telecom, and healthcare. If a client requires particularly deep industry skills, the firm can tap its rapidly expanding Circle of Experts. Furthermore, using these three verticals as the springboard, it is now developing expertise in other verticals such as energy (oil, gas and, increasingly, renewables) and consumer packaged goods.

The recession took its toll on KPO, along with all other offshore and outsourcing services. The bad news is that after years of 70% annual growth, KPO revenue growth effectively ground to a halt from September 2008 to August 2009. The good news is that industry revenue did not actually fall. In fact, it still grew by 3%-5%! Even financial services revenues held steady for the entire industry.

Evalueserve even sees something of a silver lining in this no-growth year, both for itself and for the KPO industry at large. After years of growing at an unsustainable rate, the company finally had a chance to cut some fat from the organization and to shed the bottom 5% of its workforce. This thinning, combined with the growing availability (not to speak of slightly lower cost) of more senior people, also allowed the firm to hire more experienced talent.

In some ways, the recession has also improved Evalueserve’s competitive position. Its size and diverse line of services gave it an advantage over its legion of smaller, more specialized rivals. More importantly, the recession has slowed the KPO progress of the leading Indian IT service providers and prompted them to dedicate their efforts to retaining their core businesses rather than investing in the very different research and especially sales skills required for KPO.

Although Evaluserve, like many other firms, is seeing encouraging signs of growth, especially from companies looking to expand capabilities without taking on the commitment of hiring full-time employees. This being said, it does have one important concern—a growth in protectionism that is likely to grow as long as unemployment remains high. Although it will be tough to avoid this highly emotional issue, Evalueserve does at least have one other advantage over its larger offshore service rivals—its U.S. business is not dependent on H1B visas,  and when it does open its U.S. delivery center, it will staff it with Americans.

Opportunities for U.S. Knowledge Workers

Evalueserve, like many of the big Indian IT services companies before it, is now looking to complement its offshore and nearshore delivery facilities with onshore centers located near its largest clients. These centers, which are currently planned for the U.S. and Western Europe, will house more senior people than the company’s offshore and nearshore centers.

While offshore analysts typically have 3-5 years experience, onshore Research Architects and Solution Architects will be seasoned professionals. They will often have graduate degrees (MBAs, MS in engineering and even PhDs) and 10 or more years experience in their disciplines. They will also play very different roles. Rather than performing analysis, they will evaluate client needs, design research requirements, manage projects, present findings to clients and deliver additional levels of value, such as by interpreting research results within the context of market and industry realities and engaging in strategic dialogs with clients. They will also play demand creation roles, as by working with Account Executives to evaluate and promote additional opportunities within existing accounts.

The company plans to begin hiring these new onshore professionals (initially in financial services and heath care, with other disciplines following), when it becomes confident that the North American and Western European economies are truly on the mend.

What does all this mean for U.S. and European knowledge workers? At a very high level, offshore KPO services will pull growing numbers of service jobs—especially lower-skilled, more standardized and non-customer-facing jobs—out of the U.S. and other developed countries. It will, however, create smaller numbers of higher-skilled, more customer facing, and higher-paying jobs in these countries. This, however, is only the tip of a very large, very deep iceberg. I will examine the broader implications of the globalization of knowledge services in my March 14 blog, tentatively titled, “The Economic, Competitive, Social and Political Implications of KPO”.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, IT/Software-as-a-Service, Job and Career Opportunities, STEM Careers, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Evalueserve’s KPO Service Offerings

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

My last blog discussed the outsourcing of knowledge-based services and the growth and breadth of the Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) industry. This blogs drills into some of the most general of these offerings by focusing on the evolution and growth of a single provider, Evalueserve. I focus on this company not because its services are unique (many KPO providers have similar offerings), but because it is representative of the broad range of horizontal knowledge-based business services that are now available from India.

Evalueserve Offerings

Evaluserve, which was founded in December 2000, now consists of more than 2,100 employees in Delhi-Gurgaon, India; Shanghai, China; Valparaiso-Santiago, Chile; and Cluj, Romania. Since it is a private company, its precise annual revenues are not known, but they are believed to be around $100 million. Its first offerings, launched in 2001, included intellectual property and business research services, targeted at lawyers, consulting companies, and investment banks. It added roughly one additional service per year, consisting of market research services, other banking-related research services, risk and data analytics services, and, in 2007, a range of legal process offerings.

It currently offers eight types of services, which are combined in distinct ways to provide customized solutions for its customers:

  • Market Research – qualitative and quantitative surveys and focus groups to address issues including employee satisfaction, brand perception, customer loyalty, event effectiveness, and new concept testing.
  • Business Research – market sizing, market assessment and segmentation studies, value chain analyses, competitive research and analyses, innovation searches, company profiling, and the identification of new business opportunities and business partners.
  • Investment Research – independent and support services to all types of financial services companies across four primary areas: equity, fixed income, corporate finance, and buy-side. It provides a full range of research services plus a broad range of analytical services, such as to model portfolios and risk, allocate resources, and simulate returns. It also provides reports and develops pitch books and marketing packs.
  • Intellectual Property Research – patentability and invalidation searches, patent landscape and portfolio analyses, patent drafting and filing services, and patent litigation support services.
  • Legal Support Services – a broad range of legal research and litigation, electronic document discovery, immigration support services, ongoing contract management, with the ability to bring engineers, scientists and business analysts, as well as lawyers and paralegals onto teams.
  • Marketing and Sales Support – services covering the sales spectrum, including lead generation, proposal and collateral production; sales analytics; client satisfaction studies; sales process benchmarking and public relations support.
  • Knowledge Technology Development – developing knowledge management tools including portals, taxonomies, business intelligence and data warehouses, and content management and elearning solutions.
  • Data Analytics – data acquisition and modeling as well as the use of analytics techniques including simulations and econometric modeling plus more specialized credit risk, consumer risk and market risk analytics services to banks and insurance companies. In addition, it builds dashboards and offers specialized services atop packaged data analysis software, such as Cognos.

Although the vast majority of Evalueserve analysts are recent graduates with only a few years of experience (see my next blog), the company also recognizes and accommodates client requirements for assistance from much more seasoned industry experts. The company’s Circle of Experts program is a network of more than 20,000 senior independent consultants or retired executives from across the globe, each with deep domain and industry expertise in their specific fields. These experts, who are billed at anywhere from $150 (for an Indian expert) to $900 (for a U.S. one) per hour, can address specific client questions, provide days of consulting, or provide an extra level of analysis to work provided by more junior Evalueserve analysts.

But while this provides an overview of the breadth of current KPO offerings, it is more important to understand the business models by which KPO providers operate, the value they provide to clients and the implications for U.S. knowledge workers is something totally different. This is the focus of my next blog.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, IT/Software-as-a-Service, Job and Career Opportunities, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »