Technology’s Impact on Job Skills

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Core Skills for Knowledge Workers in a Global Economy

Sunday, October 30th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Skills Requirements, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools | No Responses »
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Lessons from Infosys’ Employee Development Program

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

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

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

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

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

Pre-Employment Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning the Infosys Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

My February 6 blog (Shared Value Creation: The Next Evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility and of Capitalism) explained the many benefits that corporations can achieve through a new, more business-aligned approach to corporate philanthropy. This approach, which is called Shared Value Creation, consists of “policies and practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing the social and economic conditions of the communities in which it operates,” It is a concept, which as Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter explains, is becoming more than a corporate opportunity—it is practically becoming a corporate mandate: a form of “self-interested behavior” that creates economic value for the company, by the very process of creating societal value.

As Porter described in his January 2011 Harvard Business Review article, when applied effectively, shared value creation can burnish a company’s brand, attract new customers and help a company recruit employees and improve employee commitment to the organization. This, however, is only the tip of a value proposition that can go much deeper. It can directly help the company enter new markets, improve economies in existing markets and create totally new business opportunities—generating cost savings, as well as revenue gains.

While the HBR article and my February 6 blog focused on the opportunities for corporations to benefit from Shared Value Creation, a January 2011 Accenture study, New Waves of Growth: Unlocking Opportunity in the Multi-Polar World, effectively suggests ways in which shared value creation can help communities and countries, as well as companies.

Capitalizing on the Four Waves of Growth

According to the Accenture report, governments that hope to create significant growth in GDP and jobs over the next decade must capitalize on what it identifies as four major waves of growth. These waves are based on opportunities being created around:

  • The “silver” economy. The graying of the population, as through initiatives in areas including connected health, health and welfare products and services, lifelong finance and new products that are optimized for older people;
  • The resource economy. The providing of more reliable and cleaner sources of energy and other types of increasingly scarce resources (land, water, food, minerals, etc.), including the need to build and manage intelligent infrastructures and processes (as for energy, buildings, water and land management and so forth);
  • A multi-technology future. The rapid adoption and increasingly integrated roles that new technologies (such as superfast broadband, cloud computing, sensors, analytics, mobility and security) will play across all industries and processes and as integrated with traditionally distinct disciplines to create new fields such as bio-informatics, micropayments and manu-services;
  • The emerging-markets surge. The rise of a multi-polar world in which economic activity and resources are increasingly gravitating toward emerging economies and rapidly growing urban centers and creating new opportunities for all types of low-cost goods and services, citizen services and smart infrastructures.

Countries that effectively capitalize on these waves can, according to an Oxford Economics’ analysis commissioned by Accenture, gain huge benefits. The U.S., for example, could add 0.7 percentage points to its otherwise anticipated 3.1% average annual GDP growth and create 9.7 million additional jobs by 2020—a level of economic output and job growth equivalent to the current size of the entire U.S. auto industry. Other countries could achieve correspondingly similar gains. Germany, for example, could boost average GDP growth by 32% and employment by an additional 3 million, United Kingdom by 24% and 2.6 million and India by about 9% and 37.5 million jobs.

The Government Mandate

Although Accenture paints an encouraging picture for countries and societies that can effectively ride these waves of growth, accomplishing these results will take years of hard work. Strategies must be developed, smart infrastructures built, business environments enhanced and most critically, millions of people must be educated, trained and retrained to create and effectively utilize new capabilities.

This leads to the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity of all. For better or worse, no single company, government or sector of society has the resources, the skills or the reach required to define comprehensive national strategies for, much less create the foundations for capitalizing on these waves. Positioning a country to capitalize will require entirely new levels of cooperation and coordination among all types of businesses, all layers of government and many different non-profit organizations (especially schools and universities).

This is a challenge in that so few countries have seriously attempted to foster this type of cooperation (and in that many attempts to do so have failed). It is an opportunity in that there has never before been such an urgent need to do so. Emerging countries must do so to address the rapidly growing aspirations (not to speak of the expectations and demands) of their citizens. Developed countries must find ways of compensating for relative declines in economic power and security and especially for preparing their citizens to compete and thrive in an increasingly global workforce.

The good news is that there are a growing number of examples in which corporations, schools, foundations and government entities are cooperating to address common needs. These, as discussed in my last two years of blogs and reports, include Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Program, IBM’s Academic Initiative, Intel’s Teach and Entrepreneurship programs, General Electric’s Ecomagination program (see my forthcoming March blogs and report) and IBM’s Smarter Planet and Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities initiatives (see my forthcoming April blogs). Not to speak of Accenture’s own Skills to Succeed program.

But as effective as some of these and other industry efforts have been, and as promising as some of their prospects, most address only specific, often local elements of huge, multi-faceted national problems. Large-scale success will require thousands of such initiatives and increasingly formal coordination among them.

There is, however, precious little evidence that most countries are prepared for such efforts. The U.S., in particular, has a fundamental and very vocal disagreement as to whether such efforts will indeed help or harm the country. But disagreement notwithstanding, President Obama is intent on creating foundations for such cooperation. He has, for example, engaged foundations in his effort to enhance community college curricula and graduation rates and has recently enlisted two high-profile business executives to chair groups that are intended to align public and private-sector efforts around initiatives to prepare the nation for the future (and incidentally, to capitalize on Accenture’s waves).

In January 20011, he named General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt as chairman of his new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness (whose mission is described by its name) and Steve Case as chairman of Startup America (whose goal is to promote entrepreneurism and high-growth startups). Both are likely to enlist other executives into their efforts and coordinate their efforts with other business constituencies. Immelt is likely to draw members and ideas from groups to which he belongs, such as the Business Roundtable and the Business Council. Startup America, meanwhile, has already won support of and about $400 million in funding from IBM, Intel and Hewlett-Packard. Both groups will at least formalize private sector inputs into critical government decisions. Ideally they will do more, such as usher in an era of cooperation among public, private and non-profit sectors.

After all, as Accenture explains, no one segment of the economy controls all of the levers required to mobilize all the country’s efforts. “Coordination among the three sectors—business, government and non-profit—will no longer be a bonus, but a necessity.”

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | No Responses »
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Elementary, My Dear Watson?

Sunday, February 20th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

Will the Real Watson Please Stand Up

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

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

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

It is Indeed, Elementary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watson’s Next Careers

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

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

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

This leads to what is probably the most important and imminent of applications for Watson Technology—its use in health care. Although the potential applications are numerous, the first and highest-impact application is likely to be in diagnostics, such as where a doctor can input lists of symptoms, medical histories, and a broad range of other relevant information to identify possible illnesses.

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

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

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

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

Posted in IBM, Innovation/Entrepeneur, Job and Career Opportunities, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | No Responses »
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Partnering Strategies for a Smarter Planet: Developing Win-Win Partnerships with IBM

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

This is a summary of my new January 2011 report “Partnering Strategies for a Smarter Planet: Developing Win-Win Partnerships with IBM”. For more information on this report or to purchase it for $995, click here.

IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative is the foundation of what, if successful, may represent one of the most fundamental corporate transformations of all time—transforming IBM from a provider of IT solutions into an architect of solutions to some of the world’s biggest, most pressing needs.

IBM intends for its application of IT tools to real-world “where digital meets physical” needs to enable it to leverage its strong position in the maturing, “relatively small” IT market into an entirely new role—that of being the primary digital enabler (and, in some cases, the centerpiece) of solutions for dozens of other much bigger markets, from healthcare to energy and transportation to government. The company’s contributions to solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems could also provide very nice side benefits, including enhancing the company’s already strong brand image.

The benefits of IBM’s Smarter Planet focus, however, are likely to transcend society and the IBM Corporation—they are also likely to benefit a number of IBM’s partners. Maximizing these benefits, however, can require some careful balancing.

Smarter Planet Ecosystem Benefits

IBM bases its entire Smarter Planet vision on an obvious (at least to those of us in the IT industry) proposition—traditional real-world infrastructures and processes can be made much more effective and efficient by making them more:

  • Instrumented, as through the use of sensors;
  • Interconnected, as by the Internet; and
  • Intelligent, through the use of analytics.

Since all these of these capabilities are already available, IBM and its partners have opportunities to begin providing real value around them today. And since all of these capabilities will be ubiquitous in the future, these markets will grow rapidly into huge opportunities. Companies that develop, tune and develop proof points around their current offerings have the potential of establishing themselves as leaders in these markets of the future. And, oh yes, their solutions also have the potential of providing big societal benefits in the normal course of doing business.

But how can companies achieve the market traction required to establish themselves in such new markets? Individual ISVs typically lack the visibility and the scale; large physical market vendors (like Eaton and General Electric) have little experience with sensors, Internet enablement or analytics; and IT system vendors (including IBM) lack the experience, not to speak of the brand permission and customer relationships, required to build smart buildings and power grids.

The solution, of course, is to build an ecosystem that seamlessly integrates the products, expertise and brands of thousands of complementary companies into compelling solutions to pressing needs. And while a number of vendors are building their own ecosystems around specific classes of solutions today, IBM’s Smarter Planet is, by far, the broadest (encompassing 25 different initiatives), the biggest (consisting of thousands of partners) and the most highly visible (with 35-40% customer recognition).

Dancing with Elephants

While IBM is building both standards and go-to-market ecosystems around each of its 25 Smarter Planet initiatives, those for Smarter Buildings and Cities are currently the most developed, followed by those around Energy and Sustainability. But even within these, IBM’s own offerings, much less its brand and customer relationships are limited. This leaves plenty of white space for partners.

Consider, for example, Smarter Buildings. While all partners must, at a minimum, provide products and services that contribute to an end-to-end solution, IBM particularly values partners that can deliver additional capabilities. Partners like Honeywell, Schneider and Eaton, for example, have established relationships with real estate developers and construction companies and can provide IBM (and other ecosystem partners) with the brand permission and deep customer relationships required to play in areas like smart building design and operations. They also have deep expertise in areas such as HVAC and lighting and may often offer performance-based energy contracts (which IBM does not). IBM not only encourages, but depends on such partners to take the lead in many accounts.

IBM, in turn, also provides considerable value to these companies. First, as mentioned, the Smarter Planet brand provides considerable market recognition and an established base of partners. IBM, of course, is also more likely to have IT and C-level contacts among companies looking to build new buildings and retrofit older buildings and can bring partners into Smart Data Center contracts. It has the IT skills required to integrate all building systems into a seamless network, the digital dashboards required to monitor and manage them and the analytics software to optimize performance and anticipate and prevent disruptions. Just as importantly, it has a huge, established ISV program with well defined processes and a library of Industry Frameworks that greatly reduce ISV’s work in building applications.

IBM certainly provides partners with new opportunities to expand into new and vastly larger markets than most could hope to enter alone or with their own smaller ecosystems. Meanwhile, its extensive technical and market development assistance programs can proactively help its partners capitalize on these opportunities.

But while all participants can value from participation in Smarter Planet ecosystems, such relationships are not without friction. There are risks to dancing with IBM, as there are with any giant. Although the company has relatively few products that compete directly with those of its ecosystem partners, IBM has huge technical, consulting and outsourcing services organizations and it values account control at least as much as any other company.

Partners, therefore, must tread carefully. On one hand, in order to gain the greatest value from the relationship, they must understand the types of value they can provide that will make them most valuable to IBM at different stages of the market and of specific customer engagements. On the other hand, they must simultaneously ensure that their brand, their value adds and their customer relationships are not subsumed by or eventually subjugated to those of IBM.

The bad news is that uncertainly and jockeying for position is inherent in all new markets. Maneuvering is always difficult and sometimes imposes great stress in the relationship. The good news is that as markets grow (and those for Smarter Planet solutions inevitably will) relative roles always seem to sort out, go-to-market relationships are solidified and coordination processes are formalized. Partners will increasingly recognize and agree on when and how they can work together, and when they will not. These relationships have become so common in the IT industry that a word has been coined to describe them. The word is “coopetition.”

Posted in Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, IBM, IT Industry Trends, Smart Infrastructure, Societal Forces, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | No Responses »
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Occupational Opportunities for the Next Decade

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

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

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

Tomorrow’s Largest Growth Occupations

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

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

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

Both, for example, are:

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

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

IT Professions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Community/Other Colleges, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Payoffs of a College Education

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

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

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

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

The Lifetime Advantages of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

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

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

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

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

Transformation to a Services-led Workforce

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

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

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

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

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

Enterprise Services as HP’s Business Solutions Incubator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, Hewlett-Packard, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Vertical Strategies, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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IBM’s Plan to Transform University IT Education And Spur Student Enthusiasm in the Process—Summary

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

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

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

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

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

Smarter Planet—Using SSME to Change the World

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

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

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

Engineering a Path to an IBM Job

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

Intel Teach (described in last week’s blog), is the centerpiece of Intel’s K-12 educational philanthropic efforts. The program’s goal is to provide educators with the capabilities to effectively use IT in their instruction and to change the classroom learning paradigm in a way that will better prepare students for the demands of the 21st century knowledge economy. (See my January 11 blog, IT Companies as Catalysts in Creating the 21st Century Workforce, for an overview of these requirements and the roles that IT companies can play in addressing them.)

The Intel program, which has offered professional development to over 7 million teachers since its 1998 launch, applies a collaborative approach in which Intel works with government organizations to co-fund the training and ensure that the schools have the support they need to implement program approaches with students. Unlike the educational programs of many other IT companies, Intel Teach focuses almost exclusively on providing schools with the tools and the training required for educators to integrate technology using research- proven approaches.

Program Objectives

Intel is a technology company. It provides enabling tools, not business solutions. It approaches its education mission in much the same way, focusing its efforts exclusively on teacher enablement, They train educators to develop new teaching methodologies that align to a local governments curriculum standards. Intel does not attempt to create, or even judge the value of specific standards, nor does it attempt to proscribe the types of schools (such as whether to focus on elementary or high schools) or courses (such as social studies or math) in which these methods should be applied. It presents opportunities to the appropriate government bodies, and lets them decide where and how these capabilities can be most effectively applied.

Intel takes a similarly hands-off approach to student curriculum, specifically deciding not to get involved in creating teaching materials or even in evaluating, promoting or marketing the courseware. It confines its efforts to working with educational agencies to create training that takes an educator from basic ICT (information and communication technology) literacy to advanced training on using ICT in schools.

The company encourages teachers to share their experiences and teaching ideas with other educators. They have consciously decided not to create a formal process for reviewing third-party courseware, or even a database into which developers can expose their materials to others. The reason: Intel believes education is locally driven and content has to align to local curriculum standards to add the most value to student learning. It invests in the creation of exemplary unit plans that align to local country standards so that teachers can see relevant examples that are practical to implement in their classrooms. These project ideas also serve to guide educators in the development of their own projects. Examples of these ideas are provided at http://educate.intel.com/en/projectdesign.

Program Successes

Although Intel has taken a relatively hands-off approach to the development and assessment of teachers’ projects, it does closely monitor the results of its enablement efforts. As mentioned, through the use of partners, the company has trained more than 7 million teachers. This means that 7 million teachers have completed at least one level of instruction in any one of Intel’s multiple Teach programs.

Although the company does not actively monitor how many courses each teacher takes, or how they intend to apply what they have learned, it does follow-up within 18 months to determine whether teachers have changed their behavior as a result of the program. It uses three primary metrics for assessing success:

  1. Do the teachers use computers more extensively for their own use?
  2. Do they use computers more frequently and more effectively in teaching?
  3. Has the Intel program helped change their teaching methods?

Intel has found that after completing at least one course of Intel Teach:

  1. Over 90% of the teachers use computers much more extensively for their own use, such as in learning new content and getting ideas for lessons and professional development.
  2. 80% of them use computers more frequently in teaching, such as in teaching concepts and in applying more relevant student assessment tools.
  3. About 50% of the teachers claim that the course has helped them ask more open-ended questions, explore new methods of teaching content and use new rubrics for assessment.

While these results themselves are sufficient for Intel to deem its program a success, the company is particularly gratified that many teachers have begun to use computers for things that Intel has not taught. Intel believes this result validates its view that familiarity breeds experimentation—exactly the type of transformational change that Intel is attempting to spur.

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