Workforce Trends

...now browsing by category

Infosys Tries to Turn Autoworkers into Programmers

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

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

A Second Chance for Ex-Autoworkers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scaling the Initiative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Community/Other Colleges, Corporate Social Responsibility, Infosys, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
Tags: Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, Infosys, Mysore, Mysore Development Center, Narayana Murthy Centre of Excellence, New York City's STEM Mentoring program, Software Boot Camp, The Workforce Development Department, Wayne County Community College

The Job Skills of the Future, and of the Past

Sunday, March 25th, 2012

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

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

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

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

Complex communication skills; and
High-level cognitive skills.

The Skills Matrix

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

The authors divide work tasks into five categories:

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

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

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

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

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

The Job Opportunities of the Future

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

Non-routine cognitive tasks; and
Complex communications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
Tags: 21st Century Careers, complex communication, core work skills, David Autor, expert thinking, Frank levy, high level thinking, integrative imagination, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, knowledge workers, non-routine cognitive tasks, non-routine manual tasks, quantitative analytics, Richard Murnane, routine cognitive tasks, routine manual tasks, soft skills, Watson

Expanding the Ranks of STEM Professionals

Monday, December 26th, 2011

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

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

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

Leakage in the STEM Education Pipeline

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

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

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

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

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

Causes of STEM Pipeline Leakage—Follow the Money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Causes of the STEM Pipeline Leakage—A Skills Gap

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Creating the 21st Century Workforce, STEM Careers, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
Tags: Hal Salzman, Lindsay Lowell, National Assessment of Eductional Progress, OECD, STEM, STEM education, Vivek Wadhwa

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:

Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed;
Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions;
Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based;
Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings;
Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning;
New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication;
Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines.
Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes;
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
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 27^th blog.

Posted in IBM, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
Tags: 21st century jobs, Carlotta Perez, Dow Chemical, IBM, Martin Flemming, McKinsey, Watson

The United States’ Clogged Technology Education-to-Employment Pipeline

Sunday, July 31st, 2011

We are being continually bombarded with news of the failures of the U.S. educational system. Although concerns span virtually all subjects, they are particularly severe in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)—the language of technological innovation and the foundation of most of the country’s competitiveness in global markets.

The problems, particularly for U.S.-born students (with the sole exception of Asian-American males), seem to compound at every step of the educational ladder and are now beginning to profoundly affect the workplace

Primary and Secondary Education Shortfalls

These shortfalls begin in our elementary and high schools. Consider, for example, that:

The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress exam found that fewer than one-third of elementary and high school students have a solid grasp of science. Worse still, students are falling further behind each year of study, with only 34% of 4^th-graders, 30% of 8^th-graders and 21% of 12^th-graders being proficient or advanced;
The OECD’s 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) found U.S. 15-year-olds near the mean for test scores and below the median ranking for each of the three tested areas, ranking 16^th of 30 in reading, 21^st in science and 29^th in math;
The New York State Education Department found that only 37% of all students who entered high school in 2006 graduated with math and English scores high enough to qualify them for college. The figure was worse in most cities, where 21% of New York City, 14.5% of Yonkers and 6% of Rochester students would qualify.

These primary and secondary education system shortfalls in science and math education flow inevitably upward, through all levels of college and university education. And this was all before the current slashing of public education budgets, teaching staffs, school hours and classes—cuts that span all levels of the education spectrum, from K-12, to community colleges, state colleges and even Tier-One public research institutions, like the University of California at Berkeley.

College STEM Challenges

Although the percentage of high-school freshman who actually graduate from high school is falling, there are indeed some positive trends among those who do graduate. First, the percentage of high-school graduates who go directly to college is steadily increasing (from 57% in 2000 to 63% in 2008). Even better, the percentage of incoming college freshman who plan to major in STEM-related fields has recovered from a decline in the 1980s and ‘90s, to approach Cold War levels, reaching 31% in 2004 and 34% in 2009. Amazingly, these percentages are almost identical among Whites, Asian-Americans, Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. In fact, the only major demographic group that is underrepresented in the “quantitative sciences” is women.

This is where the bad news begins. Among those freshman who initially aspire to a STEM degree, fewer than one-third actually graduate with these degrees within five years. Most of these entrants either drop out of school, change majors to less demanding disciplines, or take longer to graduate.

These are multiple reasons for this fall off. Many who did well in high-school classes (especially those who were not enrolled in AP classes) find themselves ill-prepared for the rigors of a STEM education. Many have to take remedial courses before ever getting to degree programs. Fewer still are prepared for the demanding workloads or are willing to accept the lower grades these courses typically produce. As we have seen in study after study, the U.S. educational system—from elementary schools through universities—is migrating to fewer classroom hours, less homework and easier grading. College students, in particular, increasingly view college at least as much of a social opportunity, as an educational opportunity.

It is in this period, between entering college and graduation, that demographic differences become pronounced. Although similar percentages of all racial groups initially aspire to a STEM degree, the differences in the percentages from each group that actually earn these degrees in five years are huge:

42% for Asian-Americans;
33% for Whites;
22% for Latinos; and
18% for African Americans.

Meanwhile, women, who now account for 58% of all U.S. college students, and an even larger percentage of honors degrees, are increasingly opting out of quantitative disciplines. True, they do (at least as of 2006) account for a majority of bachelor’s degrees in sciences including psychology (78%), agriculture (51%), biology (62%) and chemistry (52%) and are well-represented in some emergent engineering disciplines, such as environmental and biomedical. They, however, represent only small—and declining—minorities of quantitative degrees. As of 2006, for example, women earned only 20% of engineering, 21% of physics and 22% of computer science degrees. Their participation in computer science, in particular, plummeted from 37% to 22% over two decades (1985 to 2005).

And this does not even begin to assess the many problems that are plaguing the nation’s community college system—a system that is required to provide the skilled labor required to assist engineers and to produce and service innovative products. (See my series of blogs, beginning with The Community College Contribution.)

U.S. Graduate Schools as Magnets for Foreign-Born STEM Aspirants

These trends are further magnified in graduate STEM programs—but with another, big, new wrinkle.

U.S.-born racial/ethnic minorities and women have long accounted for small minorities of U.S. STEM graduate classes. Although U.S.-born minority students are gaining some ground (from 29% in 2000 to 34% in 2007), most races continue to be greatly under-represented as a percentage of all graduate students. For example, as of 2007, only 8% of all African American, 12% of Native American and 13% of Latino graduate students are enrolled in engineering, physical sciences, and biological sciences programs.

Whites are also increasingly under-represented in these programs, accounting for only 16% of total U.S.-born White graduate program enrollees. The big gainers, not surprisingly, are Asian Americans, with 29% of all of those enrolled in U.S. graduate programs studying in engineering, physical sciences, or biology.

Although women are also gaining some ground in quantitative graduate programs, their numbers and percentages remain small, accounting for fewer than 10% of all U.S. PhDs in electrical, mechanical and aeronautical engineering. (They do, however, represent more than 25% of chemical and industrial engineering doctorates and more than half of all social science and biology PhDs.)

Although U.S. born Asian-American males are rapidly ascending the STEM educational ladder, even they are being overwhelmed by Asian-born, naturalized U.S. citizens and especially by Asian citizens who chose to study in the U.S. In fact, while 90-95% of all STEM bachelor’s degrees are now awarded to U.S.-born students, 55% of all STEM PhDs now go to foreign-born students.

Although some of these foreign-born candidates are naturalized U.S. citizens, the number of foreign citizens studying in U.S. STEM graduate schools has exploded. The number of STEM doctorates awarded to temporary visa holders, for example, grew by 50% (compared with 18% in those to U.S. citizens and permanent visa holders) between 2003 and 2008 and now account for 38% of total degrees.

Even these totals, however, are dwarfed by numbers in specific fields. Visa holders, for example, now account for 45% of all physical science doctorates and 57% of all engineering doctorates awarded by U.S. universities. (A 2010 Congressional Research Service study suggests that even some of these percentages may be too low. By the time one combines those in the U.S. on permanent, as well as temporary visas, 67% of all engineering PhDs are granted to non-U.S. citizens.

Where Do We Go From Here?

This all sounds very ominous. It appears, from the numbers, that the U.S. is rapidly losing its ability to produce its own technical talent and that we will be forced to rely on “imports” for the scientists and engineers that will be required to rejuvenate our economy and compete in an increasingly technology-driven, global economy.

But is the situation really this bleak? What is the current state and the future of the U.S. technology workforce? What can U.S.-based technology companies do to address the nation’s and their own talent requirements? What role can non-U.S.-based companies play in addressing our talent shortages? Can the U.S. government help, or should it just get out of the way.

I will address these and a number of related issues in my next several blogs.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, STEM Careers, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
Tags: educational reform, National Assessment of Eductional Progress, STEM education

IBM Corporate Service Corps: Integrating Business Objectives and CSR

Sunday, January 23rd, 2011

This is a summary of my January 2011 report “IBM Corporate Service Corps: Integrating Business Objectives and CSR”. For more information on this report or to purchase it for $995, click here.

IBM has one of the strongest talent development programs and one of the strongest corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs in the technology industry. What do you get when you combine them? IBM’s Corporate Service Corps (CSC)—a great example of how companies can do well by doing good (see my May 2010 report for a view of another IBM initiative, this one or integrating its university CSR and internal talent development initiatives.)

IBM’s Corporate Service Corps is a leadership development program, inspired by the U.S. Peace Corps. It is intended to put IBM’s most valuable resource—its people—in places that can most benefit from their expertise, and provide these employees with experiences from which they can gain broad leadership and cross-cultural experience. It provides select, high-potential employees with intense experience in working with global teams on short-duration, high-intensity projects in emerging countries. It is also a big expansion of IBM’s CSR efforts that turns social volunteerism into a life learning experience.

CSC Objectives

The program, which was launched in 2008, deploys small, 8-12-person multi-disciplinary teams to provide pro bono consulting—helping emerging country government, nonprofit and non-governmental organizations develop specific plans for addressing some of their most pressing societal needs. These can range from upgrading a government agency’s IT environment and processes, to developing a supply-chain management process for getting agricultural products to market, to improving the quality of a community’s public water supply. While each project is different, each is intended to result in practical blueprints for solving problems that are limiting a country or a community’s growth and their peoples’ ability to contribute to that growth.

Although CSC is absolutely intended to deliver broad societal benefits to emerging countries, it is first and foremost a corporate leadership development program. Its goal, however, is not so much to teach specific business skills as it is to instill the qualities individuals require to become leaders in a globally integrated business. Participants are given deep, intensive exposure to emerging markets and diverse cultures and experience in forming and working in multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary teams. They are expected to return with improved cultural literacy, better appreciation for the strengths and limitations of different cultures and work styles, and especially greater adaptability and global teaming skills.

Although the program entails a lot of additional work (30-day in-country assignments plus extensive preparation and post-return requirements) in addition to the employee’s day job, participation is seen as both a privilege and a reward. It is a validation of one’s accomplishments in the company and as a steppingstone to advancement within the company. This makes the program extremely popular and selective—attracting about 10,000 applicants for the first 400 positions.

CSC Results

Although there is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence to validate the program. IBM, being IBM, requires more formal evidence that its goals are being met. Harvard Business School assistant professor Christopher Marquis designed and conducted a formal survey of participants and recipients and evaluated the results as part of a case study on the program. His findings: CSC is “effective and executing on its goals and mission” (of providing a unique—and highly scalable and cost-effective—leadership development experience, societal benefits to emerging countries and improving employee’s perception of and commitment to IBM). IBM claims the program also delivers some additional side benefits, as in improving IBM’s brand in new and emerging markets and even in creating some new sales opportunities for the company.

In some ways, there is little that is really new in CSC. It combines two relatively common corporate practices—the use of overseas postings as an executive development tool, and encouraging and funding employees to perform volunteer work. The big difference is that IBM has integrated them into a fundamentally new form that delivers these experiences to far more executive candidates than would be previously possible, and does it in a cost-effective way that delivers additional benefits to the company.

CSC Futures

IBM will absolutely continue, and modestly extend the program. Its ultimate value, however, is likely to transcend IBM. Some of IBM’s customers, including Novartis, Federal Express and Dow Corning are already learning from and have begun to implement similar programs. Meanwhile, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with IBM to create the Alliance for International Corporate Volunteerism (ICV). The alliance will expand upon the CSC model to facilitate participation by many other companies and create corporate responsibility networks that integrate activities of corporations, governments, international organizations, foundations and other participants. USAID will also serve as a delivery coordinator for some of these projects, thereby increasing the chances that CSC’s consulting recommendations will deliver their intended value.

Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, IBM, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, Skills Requirements, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
Tags: Alliance for International Corporate Volunteerism, Australian Business Volunteers, CDC Development Solutions, Christopher Marquis, Corporate Service Corps, corporate social responsibility, CSR, Digital Opportunity Trust, economic development projects, Executive Service Corps, IBM, ICV, leadership development program, pro bono consulting, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, social volunteerism, U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID

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 1/10^th to 1/20^th 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 »
Tags: 21st Century Careers, 21st century educational models, College and university challenges, college students, community colleges, Education, education programs, labor force

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 »
Tags: 21st century workforce, career paths, careers, foreign students, global knowledge economy strategies, Intel, jobs, Jobs of the 21st century, Jobs of the future, workforce of the future

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: BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Claudio Goldin, college dropout, community colleges, cost of higher education, Education, education costs, employment, Gates Foundation, getting into college, higher education, Lawrence Katz, Lisa Kahn, Michael MacPhearson, Occupational Outlook Handbook, unemployment, William Bowen

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: BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Education, employment, job prospects, Occupational Outlook Handbook, U.S. labor market, unemployment, value of education

Tom Kucharvy's Blog

The Future of U.S. Knowledge Work in a Global Economy