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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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Understanding Evalueserve’s KPO Business

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

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

Service and Employee Management

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

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

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

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

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

Addressing Client Needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunities for U.S. Knowledge Workers

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

My December 13 blog, IBM National Roadmaps: Creating National Workforce Development Strategies, described the process by which IBM works with countries to create national roadmaps—detailed development plans that identify the types of services in which countries, regions, states or cities have the foundation for comparative advantage and the steps that must be taken to realize these plans.

Although these roadmaps provide detailed recommendations and timelines for achieving them, what will prevent the roadmaps from “enjoying” the same ignominious fate of so many other consulting studies? 

Two things. First, when the study is a prelude to a potential investment by IBM, the initiative is formalized in a Memorandum of Understanding in which each party commits to defined investments and schedules.

More importantly, IBM has at its disposal a not-so-secret weapon—its University Alliances Program. As discussed in my October 2009 report, IBM’s Effort to Create the Workforce of the Future, IBM has made a huge investment in and is actively partnering with universities. It draws heavily on these relationships to turn its National Roadmap visions into reality.

The Batteries of Nations

IBM sees universities as “the batteries of nations”—the primary vehicles for creating and storing a country’s knowledge. Therefore, it selects clusters of some of each nation’s top research universities and partners with them to help:

  • Create the talent required under the roadmap by helping sufficient numbers of students develop the required skills;
  • Pioneer the services systems that will insure that the services developed in the nation will be effective, efficient and sustainable in a global services economy; and
  • Facilitate the creation of the national infrastructure that will be required for the country to achieve its development goals.

Talent development is the most fundamental of universities goals. IBM’s role is in helping these universities identify the types of skills that will be most required for tomorrow’s jobs, helping them create the curricula for teaching these skills and, where appropriate, volunteer IBM domain experts as advisors or adjunct professors. (See How IBM is Helping Universities Develop 21st Century Workforces for a specific discussion of IBM’s University Alliance program and its talent creation efforts.)

Developing the people required to man a world-class services center is a necessary first step. However, as mentioned, producing service delivery providers (and eventually managers and executives) for these centers provides little real value if the center is not capable of maintaining a long-term advantage relative to other countries with lower cost structures.

IBM, therefore, also helps local universities develop the skills required to design and continually upgrade the processes, technologies and organizational models surrounding the services that will be delivered in the country. It works with these universities to create Services Science, Management and Engineering, or SSME curricula, helps prepare professors to teach and lead research projects around these areas and helps the universities create the type of interdisciplinary research centers required to coordinate and drive research around these systems. And since no university (or even cluster of universities) is an island unto itself, IBM also helps create links among universities in other countries with complementary research focuses.

IBM also helps these universities address the host country’s infrastructure requirements by identifying the region within the country that will be most appropriate for a large service facility—typically an urban center with a critical mass of top universities, talent and the foundations for the required IT, communications and transportation infrastructures. 

It helps them identify the infrastructure enhancements that will be required and works with the universities to create research centers (such as around energy, communications or transportation) to focus on these needs. It even participates in programs designed to help countries implement such systems, as with India’s Great Mind Challenge, in which students (under the guidance of professors) donate time to help local governments automate traditionally manual functions.

Conclusions

IBM provides all these services worldwide and uses the same type process for helping design SSME curricula and services centers in all countries, including in the U.S., as for its new Iowa service center.

However, while IBM does appear to have more formalized models than most other companies for handling more of the pieces for helping countries execute on national roadmaps, it is certainly not alone. Many leading management consultancies perform similar analyses for national and regional governments and for corporations. Meanwhile, any large vendor preparing to make the huge investments associated with creating a large service center in a new country or state, will perform similar analyses and establish similar (albeit typically more narrowly focused) alliances with local universities.

Some such studies have even been performed for the U.S. A few have gone beyond studies, generating bi-partisan support and culminating in laws, such as the National Innovation Act of 2006. But given the incredible level of partisan controversy surrounding the last such study and law (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), it is unlikely that we will see many more such studies, not to speak of broad-based support of any type of meaningful plan, in the near future.

That’s a shame. While the U.S. is currently preoccupied with the need to create jobs, it appears that in our current state, we will be satisfied with virtually any job. We can worry later about whether that job will yield high value, provide a viable career path or be sustainable in an increasingly global economy and workforce.

Oh well, perhaps it is better not to have a plan. After all, if we don’t have a plan or a specific goal, any path will get us there. 

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IBM, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, Job and Career Opportunities, Political Forces, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 1 Response »
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IBM National Roadmaps: Creating National Workforce Development Strategies

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

I’ve written a lot about IBM workforce development efforts over the past few months. My July 27 blog, How IBM is Helping Universities Develop 21st Century Workforces, specifically examined the company’s Academic Initiative. My October 11 blog, IBM’s Role in Creating Tomorrow’s Workforce, as well as in a more detailed report, I assessed the company’s broader approach to workforce development.

IBM’s workforce development efforts, however, extend well beyond helping universities and its own employees prepare for the careers of the future. The company’s National Roadmaps, and associated Innovation Roadmaps, help entire countries develop and jumpstart broad, national workforce development programs.

National Roadmaps

National Roadmaps (and their state, local and regional corollaries) are government-backed economic development plans that define specific development objectives and identify the requirements for achieving them.

Although government bodies can create their own roadmaps, IBM’s Governmental Programs office can help. This integrated corporate group draws on resources from across the company to help governments create and lay the foundations for achieving long-term economic and societal strategies.

These roadmaps, on which IBM has worked with more than 15 countries (including the U.S., U.K., India, Brazil and Australia), can be initiated as a means of addressing current or anticipated needs, as part of an integrated economic development strategy or, more tactically, as a means of attracting IBM and other technology companies to increase hiring in their countries.

The first step in preparing these roadmaps entails working with the government body to identify the country or region’s unique advantages, their primary development opportunities and their highest-payoff approaches for developing sustainable jobs. IBM then uses its Global Business Services’ Component Business Model to identify the region’s current assets, gaps, hotspots (in which investments will yield the greatest benefits) and key performance indicators (with which to measure and assess progress).

The next step is to reach agreement on three primary requirements for achieving the roadmap’s goals. These requirements are the:

  1. Talent, people and skills that will be required;
  2. Infrastructure, including the educational, IT and communications requirements; and
  3. Investment, to ensure the availability of funds to address the agreed upon talent and infrastructure development commitments.

Innovation Roadmaps

An Innovation Roadmap is the necessary first step in any National Roadmap. It specifies the types of services that the country is aspiring to develop, the number of people that must be trained, the “services systems” that will be required to effectively and efficiently deliver services and the role that the government, IBM and other corporations and local universities will play in developing these service systems.

Services systems are the critical component of any effective service-based model. These systems consist of the combination of people, processes and technologies (either within individual, or across multiple organizations) for producing and delivering a service. It ensures that each service process is specifically defined, consistently performed and measurable.

This type of “scientific” service design ensures that each service instance (wherever, and by whomever it is performed) is consistent and that deviations can be immediately detected and addressed. Just as importantly, it allows each service to be continually evaluated and optimized to improve effectiveness and efficiency. This creates the potential for a type of continual improvement (something of a Moore’s Law of services) and for allowing individual countries to maintain comparative advantage relative to competitors with lower cost structures.

Where’s the Beef?

Interesting concept, but what keeps these Roadmaps from being just another academic study—a presentation to which all participants eagerly nod their heads and a nicely bound report that sits on the shelf to collect dust?

That is the subject of next week’s blog.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IBM, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, Job and Career Opportunities, Other Schools, Political Forces, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 1 Response »
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Right-Brain Skills for 21st Century Jobs

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

In previous blogs, I’ve written extensively of the needs for tomorrow’s employees to combine quantitative and qualitative skills (articles including Business Analytics as a High-Value Career Opportunity) and the needs to become an interdisciplinary “T-shaped” generalist, rather than a narrowly-focused specialist. (IBM’s Role in Creating Tomorrow’s Workforce among other articles).

There is absolutely no question that the high-value white-collar jobs of the future will require a boarder range of increasingly deep knowledge and left-brained analytical skills. This is a given. But while deep knowledge and strong, increasingly interdisciplinary analytical skills will be a necessary for capturing tomorrow’s jobs, they may not be sufficient to keep these jobs. They certainly won’t be sufficient to command the world-class compensation, security or prestige associated with the type of world-class skills that will be required to succeed in a world in which:

  • Increasingly sophisticated IT capabilities automate (or at least significantly reduce) the amount of relatively routine, “lightly analytic” labor that is currently associated with many business processes; and
  • The rapidly growing number and expanding skills base of hundreds of millions of low-cost developing country white-collar workers (combined with ever higher-speed networks and improved IT-enabled communications and collaboration capabilities) who are capable of performing the type of increasingly sophisticated tasks that have been traditionally reserved for developed country workers.

Just what are the additional requirements for capturing and retaining the high-value jobs of tomorrow? As Tom Friedman explained in his October 22nd New York Times editorial “The New Untouchables”, the experiences of the current recession may provide some important lessons for the future. As Friedman explains, the people who are receiving pink slips during the current recession are “the average practitioners”—those people who perform routine tasks and those that wait for work to be handed to them.

Those who are too valuable to layoff—those that Friedman calls “the new untouchables” are “those with the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work”. These people have the “imagination….to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies.”

I totally agree with Friedman. Companies, and virtually every other type of organization, need—and will do all in their power to retain—people with:

  • The imagination to identify new opportunities;
  • The initiative and the skills to build compelling business cases around them; and
  • The interpersonal and communication skills required to sell these ideas.

It is true. A small percentage of people—those with truly exceptional analytical skills and/or with exceptional understanding of  particularly important areas—will continue to be sought after, retained and rewarded for their analytical skills alone. The vast majority of us, however, need more. They need varying combinations of the type of right-brained skills that Daniel Pink, in his 2006 book, “A Whole New Mind” (see his blog at http://www.danpink.com/), broadly categorizes as:

  • High concept, “the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, … to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new;” and
  • High touch, “the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, … and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.”

All employees must certainly have the type of analytical skills and intellectual content that is required of every job. But those who hope to make themselves indispensible to their employers must have much more. They must be capable of coming up with unique, breakthrough ideas and express these ideas in a way that will be compelling to and elicit the desired responses from others.

Easy to say, but awfully tough to do. Few people possess sufficient levels of all three—analytical, conceptual and empathic—skill sets. Fewer still can combine them in just the right way, at the right time.

The big question, however, is how our society can best teach these skills and the ways to most effectively apply them. In theory, it’s much easier to teach analytic skills than it is to teach conceptual or empathic skills. We have certainly had much more experience in doing so. But given our educational system’s very scattered record at teaching even basic analytic skills, can we even expect them to play a role in teaching the other two? Where else will these skills come from? From family? Peers? Employers?

And if we don’t know how to teach these skills, how will we begin teaching another trait that may prove to be even more important in ensuring lifetime career success in an increasingly volatile, unpredictable world? How will we teach the type of adaptability that will be required to continually reinvent oneself to meet the demands of conditions we cannot even ponder, or jobs that we cannot yet define?

Although schools, family, peers and employers must all play some role in teaching these increasingly critical skills, there is no escaping the uncomfortable truth. Every individual must assume greater responsibility for defining their own skills requirements and for ensuring that they develop these skills.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, Job and Career Opportunities, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | 1 Response »
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An Elusive Hope for “H-1B Inaction”

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

The H1-B visa program, which grants temporary visas for educated, foreign workers in “specialized occupations” to enter the U.S., has long been a political lightening rod. Proponents claim that the program is absolutely required as a means of gaining access to technical skills that are in short supply in the U.S. Opponents, by contrast, contend that it takes jobs away from U.S. citizens and allows corporations to replace high-wage U.S. workers with lower-paid foreigners.

Although vendors have continually pressed for the government to lift the 65,000 visa annual quota for such visas, the political winds—especially during the recession—have been blowing in exactly the opposite direction. Congress, for example, placed restrictions on bailout recipients’ hiring of foreign workers and Senators Grassley and Durbin have introduced legislation that would make it more difficult for all firms to bring workers in under this program. And this does not even begin to consider the dozens of more subtle, less institutionalized “barriers” to the program that Vivek Wahdwa discusses so passionately in his many studies and articles.

Encouraging Signs

Although I do see some opportunities for abuse, I believe that the program, on balance, is not only positive for the U.S., it is essential. We simply are not graduating sufficient numbers of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) professionals from our universities. Moreover, as I have discussed in previous blogs, a rapidly growing percentage of these undergraduate students—and the majority of STEM graduate students—are citizens of other countries (especially India and China).

Our universities need foreign students to fill their classrooms and pay for the professors and facilities that keep our programs ahead of those of other countries. U.S. businesses, meanwhile, need these skills if they are to remain competitive. And, 24% of all U.S. technology start-ups launched between 1980 and 1998 included at least one non-U.S. citizen as a founder, we apparently also need them to help create the new companies that produce such a large percentage of this country’s new jobs.

Given the importance I attribute to encouraging talented foreigners to study and work in the U.S., it may seem odd that I applauded a Thursday 30th Wall Street Journal article that showed that the number of visas issued this year will fall well short of the 65,000 quota for the first time in six years. This is quite a reversal from the typical pattern in which the entire annual quota for visas is snapped up on the first day they become available.

Why did I find this article encouraging? Because it provided at least some evidence that the market is self-correcting. It suggests that vendors, as they repeatedly insist, do bring in foreign workers to address skills gaps within the U.S. market, rather than as a means of substituting lower-paid developing company workers for U.S. workers. My hope is that such results may dampen some of the political pressure that surrounds this program.

The Sad Reality

But alas, such a reprieve is unlikely. First, as we all know, the current 9.8% unemployment rate will inevitably rise before it even begins to decline, and this decline promises to be painfully slow. Political pressure on the program is, therefore, likely to continue.

Just as importantly, another Wall Street Journal article from the same day suggested that the decline is indeed an anomaly—that it was largely attributable to the plummeting growth of Indian outsourcing contracts and that it will reverse as soon as these contracts begin to revive. After all, the vast majority of these visas are taken not by American companies looking for additional workers, but by Indian service providers that bring consultants into this country to assist on projects being performed primarily in India. In the article, N. Chandrasekaran, CEO of Tata Consulting Services, explained that while the company was actively expanding its offshore (i.e., non-Indian) workforce, most of this growth would be in other developing countries. In fact, Tata generally finds it easier, less expensive and more convenient to bring workers from India to address U.S. projects, than it is to hire U.S. employees.

There is, however, another even deeper reason why the demand for foreign technical workers will continue to grow. It is looking increasingly unlikely that the supply of highly trained U.S. STEM graduates will grow anytime soon. Although tentative initial evidence cited in a recent New York Times article suggests that U.S. college enrollment continues to increase, this gain is almost entirely attributable to growth in community college, rather than in four-year university or graduate school enrollment. Moreover, as discussed in my previous blogs, smaller percentages of U.S. university students are electing to study technical subjects.

And if we are really looking for discouraging news, we need look no further than another New York Times article that demonstrates one popular way in which the country is currently addressing the academic deficiencies of our public schools. According to the article, in fear of being penalized for not meeting No Child Left Behind performance requirements, 15 states have found a creative way of staying in compliance—they simply lowered the scores required to demonstrate proficiency.

Given the current state of affairs, the chances of increasing or eliminating the 65,000 per year cap on visas are probably below zero. The best we can probably hope for is a reprieve in populist and political pressures to limit the H-1B program. But, as much as I would like to hope for such a reprieve, I am afraid we will have longer to wait. The demand for talented scientists, technologists and mathematicians will continue to grow as the domestic supply of such people declines. And with unemployment rates expected to continue at high levels for the next several years, political and populist pressures against foreigners are likely to continue to grow.

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, Job and Career Opportunities, Political Forces, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Time for a New Job Search Strategy?

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

My Sept 27, 2009 blog, Leveraging University Education into Careers for the New Economy,  provided recommendations for students looking to structure their coursework in a way that would increase their odds for getting a job. But what about knowledge workers who have already graduated and now find themselves among the 9.7% of the workforce that is unemployed, or the 16.7% that is underemployed? What can these people do to maximize their prospects?

Some professionals, such as engineers, nurses, statisticians and, to a lesser extent, math and science teachers (to the extent they are out of work), generally have few problems in getting a new job. These and other specialty-skill job openings (including some high-skill blue collar jobs, such as for precision welders) are, in fact, going begging for qualified candidates. Similarly, some metropolitan markets, such as Washington D.C. and Baltimore (which employ large numbers of government, medical and defense workers), still have tight job markets. Unemployment remains at a relatively low 6.2% and, according to a Wall Street Journal article, there is one job opening for every unemployed person. Even this, however, doesn’t help those that don’t have sought-after skills.

For the most part, jobs are tough and they are going to remain that way. The Labor Department, for example, calculates fewer job openings in July than any time since it started tracking these numbers in 2000. In fact, the current level of 2.4 million job openings are half of the number from the mid-2007 peak.

Some metro areas–especially Detroit—are in particularly tough shape, with unemployment rates of up to 17.7% and as many as 18 unemployed people chasing every opening. And to make matters worse, the combination of factors such as plummeting home values, a dearth of home buyers, diminished savings accounts and limited availability of credit, make it difficult for people to move to locations with better (or at least less worse) job prospects.

As bad as things are now, few economists expect things to get much better any time soon. Speculation and growing evidence suggests a jobless recovery in which companies will rebuilt inventory and address initial demand by increasing the hours of current employees and, where necessary, hiring part-time and temporary workers. Most firms prudently plan to await solid, demonstrable, sustainable increase in demand before hiring new workers.

What should a laid off professional do? Give up and stay at home? Hardly. Even if current prospects are slim, shutting down a search and dedicating time to watching TV instead is self-destructive—both to one’s current attitude and to future employment prospects.

As I see it, everyone in this position should take some combination of five steps:

  1. Continue and expand your networking, both physical and virtual though the use of online social media.
  2. Keep your existing skills current or go back to school to learn new skills in fields that promise to offer better job prospects;
  3. Learn technical skills that complement those of your chosen career (especially relevant IT, math and science skills) that will allow you do deliver higher levels of value;
  4. Document your skills development efforts so that when you do get an interview, you can clearly demonstrate the currency of skills, your adaptability and ambition; and perhaps most importantly,
  5. Diversify or adapt your search strategy by positioning yourself as a temporary or part-time solution to a pressing employer need, rather than as a full-time employee.

This fifth step will be difficult to for many to swallow. It will, however, be particularly appropriate over the next 6 to 12 months as business begins to expand and corporate profits increase, but as companies, uncertain of the future, remain skeptical of committing to new expenses.

True, this approach will probably entail lower pay, little or no job security and no benefits. Worse still, it may make it more difficult for the under-employed to search for a full-time position. On the positive side, however, this strategy will allow you to position yourself as a low-cost, low-risk solution to a company’s staffing needs, rather than be part of the problem of increasing overhead in an uncertain economy. It will also give you an opportunity to prove yourself (for when the company is ready to hire), allow you to bolster your resume and (hopefully) learn new skills.

Moreover, selling yourself as a part-time solution to a pressing problem will also be great training for what many laid off professionals will find to be their best long-term career opportunity—becoming a consultant or starting your own company.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Global Forces-General, Innovation/Entrepeneur, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Technology Vendors’ Roles in Addressing the College Conundrum

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

My September 27 blog, Leveraging University Education into Careers for the New Economy, suggested how college students can structure or supplement their coursework to make them more attractive to potential employers. Many of these approaches, such as selecting appropriate majors and minors, independent study programs and thesis topics and developing strong social networking competencies, are generally within students’ own control. (Even these approaches, however, are dependent on the college/universities’ ability to fund these classes—a condition that can no longer be assumed.)

However, while many of the requirements for creating university experiences that will better prepare students for the knowledge jobs of the future are within the control of students, many others will depend on proactive efforts by the colleges. These include:

  • The teaching of math, statistics and the use of IT tools as core academic offerings and the deep integration of these tools into all coursework;
  • An increasingly interdisciplinary design and delivery of courses; and
  • Availability of proactive career counseling to help students identify career options, career pathways and the types of work that will best prepare students for opportunities in their chosen fields.

Unfortunately, many of these changes are totally antithetical to many universities’ organizational structures and cultures. For example, as I discussed in my previous blog, most universities are organized in discrete stovepipes that implicitly discourage cross-disciplinary collaboration. Professors, meanwhile, are typically hired and rewarded on the basis of their depth of knowledge in their particular specialty (rather than as interdisciplinary thinkers) and many consciously shun practical applications of their work and involvement of corporations in tuning curricula. On the other hand, most university career centers are culturally attuned to these objectives. However, they often lack the number of career counselors and the degree of interaction with the companies most likely to hire their graduates.

What’s a university to do? How can it overcome the inherent challenges of culture, tenure and a lack of resources to provide their students with the help required to prepare them for the careers of the future?

One approach is for universities to actively solicit the help of corporations that are in a position to hire graduates. Many corporations already have large, well established and very active university relationship programs. Some, such as JP Morgan Chase and Wal-Mart, help universities (Syracuse University http://globaltech.syr.edu/ and the Universities of Arkansas and Arizona respectively http://sustainability.uark.edu/15347.php) develop and fund programs under which the university creates and teaches courses and conducts research that are aligned to the company’s needs, and the companies provides internships and job opportunities for selected graduates.

But while all type of companies in virtually every industry offer programs to help universities prepare students for new jobs, as explained in my September 5 blog, The IT Vendor’s Employee Readiness Burden, I believe that IT vendors are particularly well suited to help. Why? Through their products and practices, these vendors are playing disproportionately large roles in shaping the environments in which tomorrow’s graduates will work. These vendors, for example, are developing the technologies that will redefine the nature of knowledge work and pioneering practices, such as globalization and seamless collaboration that will determine the type of students who will be best suited for different types of work. Just as importantly, IT vendors will also have some of the first and greatest needs for graduates with these new skills.

I recently wrote a report (IBM’s Role in Creating the Workforce of the Future) which talks about how IT vendors are helping universities in a myriad of ways. I’ll also continue to follow this topic in future blogs.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Global Forces-General, 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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