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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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Intel’s K-12 Education Programs

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

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

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

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

The Foundations of Intel Teach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

My previous blog provided a brief overview of Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program and its objectives of helping primary and secondary schools dramatically enhance teacher skills and transform educational models around 21st century best practices that use technology as a tool for demonstrably and measurably improving pedagogy and learning outcomes. This blog provides an overview as to how Microsoft plans to dramatically scale this program, while simultaneously ensuring—and objectively measuring—the program’s success.

A Localized, Leveraged Model

Although Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program is developed and coordinated centrally, through a 10-person headquarters staff, the real work is done in the field. The company has assembled 85 field managers (typically former teachers and school administrators) to tailor and localize the program around the needs of schools in 112 individual countries.

These local managers work not with individual schools, but with mid-level education ministry officials and leading educational experts in each country. They run policy implementer workshops to help these policy makers and implementers:

  • Envision how to transform education;
  • Discover the technologies that are available and how to most effectively apply them;
  • Identify expected results; and
  • Formulate change management processes that will be most effective in helping schools transform their education models.

This is where the leveraged model kicks in. Although the mid-level officials and educational experts have neither the authority to change their country’s educational policies nor the reach to educate and train schools and teachers, the workshops are intended to provide them with the tools required to communicate the opportunities and value of using technology both:

  • Upward, to their country’s Education Ministers; and
  • Downward to school districts and individual schools.

Teachers who have been trained in these new skills then train other teachers. Schools that successfully go through the program (so-called Mentor Schools) then train the next generation of schools (so-called Pathfinder Schools) who then become the next generation of Mentor Schools. Although the program has already trained about 2 million teachers, its efforts at transforming schools are still relatively nascent. As of the end of 2009, it had only certified 12 Mentor schools and had pre-qualified another 30 to go through its Pathfinder School program.

Microsoft, however, plans to rapidly and dramatically scale this program. The tools used in the program are available to any school and more than 1,700 schools have already begun using them. While not all such schools will wish or qualify to go through the complete program, some certainly will. By the end of 2013, the company expects to have qualified a total of 45 Mentor and 300 Pathfinder schools (who, in turn, will engage with thousands of other schools around the world) and to have trained about 12 million teachers across 112 countries.

Pretty ambitious objectives. How can Microsoft grow this program so rapidly? More importantly, how can it ensure that that it delivers the type of objectively verifiable outcomes that Microsoft is so intent on demonstrating?

With a Little Help from its Friends

These goals are clearly too ambitious for a single company, even one with Microsoft’s resources. Sure, a leveraged model will certainly help, but the Partners in Learning team cannot do it all. Therefore, the group is partnering with other groups within Microsoft. For example, it leverages content created by Microsoft Learning and works with Microsoft’s Education Products Group to create specialized education market SKUs, such as Office for Educators.

The Partners in Learning team is also actively partnering with governments, NGOs, universities, donor organizations and other corporations. For example:

  • Intel, Cisco and the World Bank helped Microsoft develop its policy implementer workshop;
  • The University of Wittwaterstrand in South Africa is the first in what will be a chain of universities that deliver these workshops;
  • The University of Washington developed the foundation for change management model that Microsoft uses in migrating schools to 21st-century skills; and
  • Third-party consultants help individual schools implement such programs.

It Takes a Community

Defining new educational models, demonstrating their value to national education leaders, training teachers, and providing a leveraged framework for implementing these models in individual schools is a necessary first step. A successful program, however, must do more. It must also maintain interest in the program, facilitate the development of courseware and other content, and allow participating teachers and schools to share experiences and emerging best practices.

That is where Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Network fits in. Although the foundation of this global, collaborative, professional development network has been in place for more than five years, Microsoft launched a new, greatly enhanced version in November 2009.

This network, which Microsoft describes as something of a LinkedIn for teachers, allows teachers to register by filling out profiles, find other teachers with similar interests and complementary experiences, create communities, build shared workspaces, and share content and best practices. Although the current network is available only in English to 17 countries, it is being extended to support Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic and is scheduled to launch in 23 additional countries over the next few months.

These virtual communities create sounding boards for new ideas, expose experiments and experiences, facilitate peer review, and facilitate rapid and broad deployment of successful practices. They also serve as a primary vehicle by which teachers can be exposed to and share courseware, curricula guidelines and content. While teachers will create the vast majority of this material, Microsoft will also provide supplemental sources. For example, as mentioned above, the Partners in Learning group is working with other Microsoft groups (including Microsoft Learning and Education Products Group) to develop and tailor offerings for educators and is also beginning to build a network of partners (such as the Smithsonian Institution) to create more.

Microsoft will also highlight particularly innovative programs and materials through its Innovative Teachers and Innovative Schools programs and competitions and allow teachers and administrators to directly share learnings in annual conferences.

Assessing and Exposing Best Practices

Although Microsoft is certainly interested in inspiring and promoting innovative programs, it is committed to ensuring that materials and learning approaches are also effective. It is, for example, working with the Stanford Research Institute to develop metrics to assess IT technologies’ effect on learning outcomes and with UNESCO to study outcomes in four very different countries (Russia, Senegal, Finland and Indonesia). The study, which is using an open, technology-independent methodology, will generate peer-reviewed assessments. It is intended to result in a set of standardized, vendor- and technology-independent metrics that schools, governments and NGOs can use as a baseline for measuring the effectiveness of different technology-enabled learning programs.

Microsoft is convinced that technology has the potential of transforming the educational process into a more student-driven, project-based model and of dramatically improving outcomes. However, it views technology as a means of achieving this goal, not as an end. It developed a program to enable and encourage teachers to experiment and develop innovative uses of this technology and to expose the most promising of these approaches to other teachers. But it’s looking for far more than innovation. It is also looking for effectiveness, by ensuring that this technology produces optimal, measurable and replicable outcomes.

Although Microsoft is genuinely focused on ensuring that education technology produces optimized results, one can be excused for suspecting something of a conflict of interest. The Partners in Learning program is, after all, run out of the company’s Public Sector Markets group—a group that is focused on, and rewarded for increasing sales into its target market. Microsoft, however, makes no secret of this affiliation or of its desire to dramatically increase the penetration of IT into schools.  In fact, it refers to Partners in Learning as a “social enterprise” rather than a “social responsibility” program. It believes it has a responsibility to help improve educational systems in all countries to facilitate the countries’ and the peoples’ economic development, to create a more robust market for technology and to develop a better equipped workforce.

In other words, what’s good for the world—or at least for the world’s education system—can also be good for Microsoft’s business. No conflict in that.

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

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

My December 6, 2009 blog on the evolving focus of Microsoft Learning examined the group’s evolving mission and its growing partnerships with colleges and universities to teach not only budding IT professionals, but also students in other disciplines (especially business) the value that IT can provide in their work.

Microsoft’s work with schools, however, goes far beyond teaching college students to use Microsoft tools in their professions. The company’s Partners in Learning program, for example, works with primary and secondary schools, helping them enhance teacher skills and transform educational models around 21st century best practices that use technology as a tool for demonstrably and measurably improving pedagogy and learning outcomes.

Partners in Learning History

Launched in 2003 with a $250 million grant, Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program’s goals were to provide schools with access to technology and help them integrate this technology into their curricula.

While the initial program produced substantive results, many schools continue to use technology in separate IT labs or to automated traditional “sage on the stage” teaching methods, such as by using PowerPoint as an alternative to whiteboards. Relatively few used this technology to fundamentally transform pedagogy into an independent, self-guided, project-based learning model in which teachers would support student-initiated learning by serving as “guides on the side”. Despite the grants and the guidance, most teachers lacked technology skills and the understanding of how to most effectively use technology in teaching, classrooms remained too overcrowded for personal attention, and governments could not provide the resources required to address these limitations.

Microsoft, however, was not discouraged. It continually adapted and then dramatically extended the program by committing an additional $235 million in 2008. The current program is built around a leveragable, holistic, best practices-based approach to transforming educational models around 21st century methods and to measuring results with objective metrics.

Microsoft is certainly making progress. As of the end of 2009, the program had produced:

  • More than 7.1 million trained teachers and school officials;
  • 12 “mentor schools”, which have successfully changed teaching and learning methods in accordance with Microsoft’s Innovative Schools Program methodology, and are now authorized to help other (Pathfinder) schools transform their own programs;
  • A pipeline of 30 “pathfinder schools”, which have already been qualified to go through the Microsoft program. These schools, although they may not yet employ advanced technology, have strong curricula, teachers and results, and leaders with a desire to go through the type of transformation required by the Innovative Schools Program. They have also completed a preparatory program including semi-annual in-person professional development sessions and monthly “virtual universities”. (Once they “graduate”, these schools qualify to become the next cohort of mentor schools.

This, however, is just the beginning. By the end of 2013, the company plans to have trained 10 million teachers across 112 countries, to have qualified 45 Mentor and 300 Pathfinder schools and to have thousands of schools in the Innovative Schools’ breadth program, though which any school can gain access to Partners in Learning tools even if they don’t complete in the full program.

How does Microsoft plan to achieve such ambitious goals? My next blog, Building a “Partners in Learning” Value Chain, will provide an overview of some of the key elements of Microsoft’s plan for driving this phenomenal growth while simultaneously ensuring—and objectively measuring—the program’s success.

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

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

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

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

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

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

My Interpretation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

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

The Evolution of Offshorable Services Jobs

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

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

Services Continunium

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

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

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

Opportunities for U.S. Knowledge Workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

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

Evalueserve Offerings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Over the last decade in my quarter-century career as an IT Industry analyst, I focused extensively on the outsourcing of increasingly high-level IT functions to offshore employees. I examined, for example, how offshore tasks have evolved from basic maintenance of old, centralized, Cobol-based applications to the architecting of new-generation, distributed Java and .Net-based apps and a broad range of other high-level IT functions. I examined how application outsourcing evolved into business process outsourcing, in which offshore providers not only managed increasingly sophisticated processes (as from basic call centers though comprehensive financial and supply chain processes), but also developed deep expertise in architecting and transforming entire processes to make them more secure, accurate and efficient.

Although Application Outsourcing (AO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) growth has (along with everything else in the business world) stalled over the last couple years, they promise to resume rapid growth as the recession ends and companies strive to institutionalize the efficiency gains achieved during the recession.

Emergence of KPO

However, the greater growth, and even greater workforce implications will come from a new generation of outsourcing—the outsourcing of a broad range of sophisticated knowledge-based processes in fields ranging from financial analysis and marketing management to legal research and the research and development of the newest generation of sophisticated IT, communication and pharmaceutical products. Even hip replacement and open heart surgery is now being outsourced!

This growth of Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), which was originally launched on the promise of cost cutting, or “labor arbitrage”, is now being driven by something else—the rapid growth in education in emerging countries and the rapid decline in availability of developed country students majoring in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. It is simply becoming easier (not to speak of less expensive) to find, grow and mange such skills in emerging countries. (Note, that while the U.S. continues to lead the world in STEM PhDs, foreign-born students now account for more than half of all graduates. And since the U.S., through a combination of government policies and societal pressures, is making it increasingly difficult for foreign graduates to work in the U.S., more and more of these graduates are returning to their home countries—especially India and China—rather than contributing to the U.S. economy.

We have all seen, or at least heard of the rapid growth in offshore knowledge work:

  • Virtually all of the major financial service companies have opened offshore financial analysis centers;
  • All leading electronics and pharmaceutical companies have build large offshore research and development teams;
  • Offshore hospitals, which perform increasingly sophisticated surgeries for 15-20% of the price of domestic hospitals—with free foreign vacations thrown in—are proliferating and U.S. insurance companies are increasingly referring patients to them.

These, however, are just the most visible tip of a revolution that has begun to touch virtually every aspect of knowledge work. And while the fruits of these offshore knowledge sources were traditionally available only to those very large corporations that had the resources, skills and patience to build and manage their own offshore centers, the emergence of third-party KPO providers is rapidly democratizing the offshore knowledge processing industry, making such services available to mid-size, as well as large firms.

The Emergence of KPO Service Providers

All of the leading Indian IT providers now offer some knowledge processing services. (Tata Consulting Services, for example, offers business intelligence and performance management services, Infosys provides legal research and litigation support services and Wipro is a leader in product engineering services). A growing number of Western outsourcing providers also provide KPO services. IBM BPO/KPO offerings include a broad range of horizontal (including supply chain management) and vertical (as for banking, insurance and healthcare) offerings. So too does Accenture, with cross-industry services including financial and human resource management and industry-specific, such as Clinical Trial Management and Pharmacovigilance.

But while most of the leading outsourcers have begun to enter this field, their progress and active marketing of these offerings has—not surprisingly—slowed during the recession. As of now, the industry remains dominated by business KPO specialists. Although there are a few multi-line KPO providers, such as Outsource2India, KPO Experts and Evalueserve, the vast majority are specialists. More than 300 Indian firms already provide horizontal or industry-specific vertical services in fields including legal research and litigation support (Lexadigm), market research (Progonsys), business analytics (C-BIA) to architectural and drafting (Indovance) services.

Although the vast majority of the larger providers focus on providing business services to large or mid-sized companies, the Internet, combined with the emergence of third-party offshore service intermediaries, are now making KPO services available to very small businesses (as for Web design and accounting) and even individuals (such as for English and math tutors to personal assistants).

But, when you talk about business KPO providers, the discussion should begin with Evalueserve, one the first and largest of India’s multi-line KPO providers. My next blog (February 28 blog) will look specifically into the growth of Evalueserve and the range of services it provides. My March 7 blog will examine the implications for U.S. corporations and knowledge workers and what students and employees can do to “outsource-proof” their careers.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, IT/Software-as-a-Service, Job and Career Opportunities, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | 3 Responses »
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The Jobs of Today—and Tomorrow

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

I have written extensively about the jobs of tomorrow and the critical role of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills in preparing applicants for these jobs. (See, for example, my recently completed free report, “IT Companies as Catalysts in Creating the 21st Century Workforce.“) As explained in a new CareerCast study, these skills also critical in preparing applicants for the jobs of today—or at least many of the “best jobs”.

“Best Jobs”

What are these “best jobs” and what makes them “the best”? The study, which compiles U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data, evaluates jobs in terms of five criteria:

  1. Stress;
  2. Working environment;
  3. Physical demands;
  4. Income and growth potential; and
  5. Hiring outlook.

While not necessarily the highest skilled (neurosurgeon, corporate M&A lawyer), highest paying (bond trader, hedge fund manager) or most glamorous (movie star, professional athlete), these jobs are available in reasonably high numbers and are available to people with relatively moderate (typically a four-year degree) degree of education.

Just what are these jobs? The top ten are, in descending order: actuary, software engineer, computer systems analyst, biologist, historian, mathematician, paralegal assistant, statistician, accountant and dental hygienist. All but two (historian and paralegal) require some form of specialized STEM education.

Perhaps none of these jobs are quite your cup of tea. Or, perhaps unlike CareerCast, you do not weigh each of the five criteria equally. You may, for example, be motivated primarily by income and advancement potential, or you may actually prefer a physically demanding job.

No worries. There are dozens of other jobs. But be forewarned: 37 of the CareerCast’s 50 “best jobs” (out of a total 200 ranked jobs) require some form of explicit math, science or technology background. Moreover, as I have discussed in previous blogs, a number of the 13 additional jobs (such as historian, sociologist, anthropologist and archeologist) increasingly require specialized IT and math skills, such as in compiling and analyzing huge quantities of information and data.  

Of course, this doesn’t suggest that ALL jobs that are intellectually, emotionally and financially rewarding require STEM educations. You can, for example, become a philosopher (11), attorney (80), author (74), clergyman (96) or artist (104), although most such professions require extensive training or specialized skills. There are also somewhat lower skill jobs. You can be a damn good paralegal (7), medical records technician (20), purchasing agent (40), jeweler (61) or actor (163) with little or no math or science training and few, if any, computer skills. But if you want to find jobs with no specialized training requirements or long apprentices, you generally have to move much further down the CareerCast list into lower-skill, more physical and/or more repetitive jobs such as waitperson (125), bus driver (137), retail salesperson (142) or mail carrier (191). And if you really want to live on the edge (literally and figuratively), you can always become a lumberjack (199) or roustabout (200).

Skills Requirements

But regardless of which type of career you choose, the work environment of the 21st century will not be like that of the 20th century. Jobs will remain scarce for at least the next five years, more positions will become temporary or freelance, and a growing number of jobs will be devalued or disappear as a result of increasingly pervasive globalization of knowledge work and the automation of functions that used to require human discretion and labor.

Success in this new environment will require much more than strong, specialized domain skills (whether STEM-based or not). Traditional left-brain analytical skills will, in fact, become the ante required for success in tomorrow’s jobs. Knowledge workers who hope to capture and retain the best, highest-value and most secure jobs must also complement these capabilities with increasingly large doses of left-brained conceptual and empathic skills. And, with all due respect to technophobes, virtually all high-value knowledge jobs will also require at least basic quantitative, statistical and IT skills. IT, in fact, will increasingly have to become the second language for almost all 21st century knowledge workers.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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The Government’s Efforts to Bridge Schools’ STEM Gap

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

I have written extensively about the U.S.’s urgent need to retool its workforce to compete in the Global Knowledge Economy of the 21st century, and of the particularly critical need for a whole new level of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) literacy. Although this need must be addressed at all education levels, from primary school through universities and continually through one’s career, the biggest and most pressing gap lies in the formative years, from elementary school through high school.

Just how big is this gap? U.S. 15-year olds now rank a dismal 21st in the world in science and 25th in math. It is similarly drawing up the bottom in high school completion, where the 2006 PISA study ranks it 21st out of 27 OECD countries. Meanwhile, at a time when virtually every knowledge-based career requires strong IT skills, most U.S. middle and high school computer classes focus on teaching rudimentary Windows, word processing and spreadsheet usage, rather than the value of IT in all disciplines and occupations. But our educational prowess relative to OECD countries is one thing. We are now even getting our STEM educational clocks cleaned by China, where:

  • Math, science (not to speak of foreign language) skills are the primary focus of the educational system, from elementary school, all the way through universities;
  • IT is integrated into math and other high school curricula, rather than taught as a standalone set of skills;
  • College STEM graduation rates far exceed those in the U.S.; and even where
  • Adult literacy rates (over 90%) are higher than in the U.S. (86%).

In reality, how could we hope for much more when most teachers graduate in the bottom quartile of their college classes, only 39% of 8th grade math teachers and 7% of science teachers even majored in the subjects they are teaching and children devote so little time to homework. Compare this again with China, where, all math and science teachers must have degrees in these subjects, school years are longer and students devote twice as many hours to homework as their U.S. counterparts.

Government Progress

Although this is all pretty grim, we are seeing progress. And it is coming from the most unlikely of places—the U.S. government. While every U.S. president since Dwight Eisenhower has tried to create a national education program, virtually every effort has failed in Congress. Sure, George W. Bush managed to get No Child Left Behind through Congress, the law allows every state to set their own standards. And, 15 states that fell short of the law’s performance requirements found a creative way of staying in compliance—they simply lowered the scores required to demonstrate proficiency.

Although a couple of multistate organizations, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officials, are making some progress in creating a voluntary set of common standards for Math and English education, Barack Obama shares his predecessor’s view of the need for national action. However, he understands (all too well) the perils of relying on Congress. He, therefore, gave Arne Duncan, his Education Secretary, unprecedented power and an unprecedented pool of money ($4.35 billion) to incent states to pursue innovative strategies for recruiting, credentialing, rewarding, and retaining teachers. Although this Race to the Top initiative will cover all subjects, it is particularly skewed to STEM education.

Obama would like to do much more to address many of the fundamental deficiencies of the current educational system. Yet he recognizes the formidable political, fiscal and practical constraints to enacting true educational reform. Therefore, he is attempting to enlist the private sector to fund and drive additional programs.

Enlisting Private Sector Help

In November, OBama announced a new campaign to encourage businesses and not-for-profit organizations to help enhance science, technology, engineering and math education in middle and high schools. This Educate to Innovate program is focused on encouraging companies and non-profits to contribute $250 million worth of time, money and volunteers to create extracurricular education programs to expand children’s interest in and knowledge of STEM. As reported in the New York Times, some of the first of what are expected to grow into a larger number of commitments include:

  • Discovery Communications is sponsoring two hours of commercial-free, after-school Science Channel programming to be targeted at middle school students;
  • Science and engineering societies’ commitments to provide volunteers to work with children;
  • PBS will incorporate a science focus into two years of Sesame Street programming;
  • Time Warner Cable, which has committed to devoting 80% of all its philanthropic efforts to science and math education, will also create and promote a web site that will provide a searchable directory of local science activities;
  • Sony will donate 1,000 PlayStation 3 game consoles and LittleBigPlanet educational games to libraries and community organizations and fund a $300,000 contest to incent game designers to develop science- and math-based games that Sony will distribute free; and
  • The Jack D. Hidary and MacArthur Foundations are working with the National Science Teachers Association and American Chemical Society to launch a website (http://www.nationallabday.org/) to create a Web site that will match volunteer scientists with teachers looking for assistance in teaching specific areas.

Intel, which already has one of the largest and most active STEM education initiatives in the world (which I’ll discuss in some future blogs), is playing a particularly central role in this imitative. It is launching a ten-year, $200 million cash and in-kind campaign to help train more than 100,000 U.S. math and science teachers and is committing its own employees to volunteer 100,000 hours to improving STEM education. Its former chairman, Craig Barrett, will also work with prominent technology CEOs and former astronaut Sally Ride, to encourage other corporations and foundations to fund and participate in efforts to improve STEM education.

Promising First Steps

The bad news is that U.S. educational system (especially elementary, middle and high school) has dug itself into a huge hole. It is not vaguely prepared to teach the types of skills that tomorrow’s workers will need to compete in an increasingly global economy that is being redefined by information and communications technology.

The good news is that virtually everybody—private sector and public sector and Democrat and Republican—recognizes these deficiencies and the urgency of addressing them. George W. Bush—with solid bipartisan support—took an important first step (No Child Left Behind) in addressing these needs. Barack Obama, without waiting for Congress, has taken two more. Race to the Top provides schools with compelling incentives to reinvent policies and processes. Educate to Innovate enlists the private sector to help identify, enable and fund some of these changes. Both focus on those areas that are in greatest need of change—how middle and high school students are exposed to and taught math and science.

Ideally, politicians of both parties will again come together to acknowledge this critical need and address it in a comprehensive and enlightened manner. But even if not, Educate to Innovate, in particular, sets an important precedent as:

  • An effort to encourage and focus the efforts of the private sector (especially information companies and foundations) around a common goal.

This will hopefully be the first of many initiatives in which government attempts to mobilize the private sector to address critical societal issues.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Education System and Institutions, Job and Career Opportunities, K-12, Political Forces, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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