Preparing the U.S. workforce for the needs of the 21st century is everybody’s responsibility. For example:
- Corporations must ensure that they will have an adequate supply of, and the ability to retain workers with the appropriate skills;
- Schools must provide students with the type of life skills, as well as the work skills that will be required for the uncertainties of tomorrow’s job markets;
- All students and employees must take more active role in managing their careers; and
- Governments must communicate the needs for new skills, encourage and enable the type of businesses that will create jobs and shelter employees from the vicissitudes of a global economy.
While all members of society bear responsibility for ensuring that they are prepared for the requirements of the new world of work, technology-intensive companies bear particularly heavy burdens: After all, they
- Have the greatest needs for the type of workers that will be in shortest supply in the U.S., and virtually all other developed countries-those with deep mathematical and technical skills; and
- Are being forced to globalize their workforces to ensure ongoing access to the best skills, at competitive costs-practices that threaten to put them at risk of running afoul of growing societal and government restrictions on hiring foreign citizens (both within and outside the U.S.).
While all technology companies face big challenges, IT vendors and IT services companies face even greater challenges. Not only must they ensure that they have sufficient skills to address their own needs, they must also ensure that their customers have access to the skills required to make effective use of the vendors’ products. They must, for example:
- Ensure that customer IT organizations are able to implement, manage, maintain and optimize operations of the vendors’ technologies (or, as an alternative, the vendor/service provider must provide the people that can outsource operation of the customer’s IT environment);
- Make sure that the business users of the vendors’ tools and applications understand how to gain the greatest business value from these products.
Why are these unique requirements so critical? Quite simply, if customers can’t derive full value from a vendor’s product, they are less likely to buy it, or refer it to other customers.
Given IT vendor and service providers’ particularly pressing needs, these vendors are among the leaders in:
- Training and managing career paths of their employees;
- Developing tools to automate relatively routine functions and to deliver higher value to discretionary functions;
- Working with educational institutions in general, and universities in particular, to ensure that students receive the type of educations that will prepare them for new jobs; and
- Globalizing their workforces, both by hiring foreign nationals to work in the U.S., and by creating offshore service centers and centers of excellence.
So, while my research on developing sustainable, high-value jobs will examine the needs of and the best practices being developed by companies across all industries, I am focusing my primary research on those of the IT industry.
Having said this, I need your help. Given my primary focus on, and my 30-year history in the IT industry, I may lose sight of unique requirements or leading-edge work being done by companies in other industries. So please tell me if you know of issues or best practices that I may be missing.
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