IT Industry Role in Education

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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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Tom Kucharvy’s 2010 Research Agenda

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

The IT Industry’s Role in Addressing the U.S.’ Technology Skills Gap: How the industry can secure its own future while providing unique value to employees, customers and society

Over the last six months, I have focused my research around two broad questions:

  • What types of skills will U.S. knowledge workers require to build careers that will deliver the highest value and be most sustainable in a global knowledge economy?
  • What must individuals, schools and corporations do to prepare for these jobs?

I recently wrote a report “IT Companies as Catalysts in Creating the 21st Century Workforce”, which I summarized in my January 11 blog. While working on it, I was particularly struck by three key conclusions:

  1. The particular risks that the IT industry will face from a paucity of required skills and the unique role the IT industry can play in creating the next generation workforce;
  2. The combination of foundation skills (including IT, Internet, math and communications) that all knowledge workers will require and how these skills can be most effectively taught and learned;
  3. The critical role that multi-faceted academic (especially university)/private sector partnerships must play in designing and delivering curricula that prepare knowledge workers for tomorrow’s careers.

I have certainly learned a lot from my research over the last six months and, hopefully, readers have valued from my posts and reports. Ultimately, however, this research ended up doing what most research does—it raised more questions than it answered. Some of these new questions are forming the foundation of my 2010 research agenda.

Here’s a peek into what I’ll be working on in 2010.

Q1 2010 Research Agenda

My 2010 research will continue to examine the changing nature of knowledge work in the 21st century and the requirements for the U.S. to build a workforce that will be truly competitive in the Global Knowledge Economy. I will, for example, drill down into a number of issues that I have touched on in my 2009 research including:

  • The skills and attributes individuals need to compete in a world in which knowledge work is increasingly defined by global competition, the automation of increasingly discretionary tasks, a deluge of data and information and the need to collaborate in increasingly fluid physical and virtual teams;
  • The relative roles of academia and the private sector in developing these skills and in creating and enabling the environments in which individuals can contribute ever higher levels of value;
  • The increasingly central role that the IT industry is playing in redefining work requirements and environments and the unprecedented opportunities for IT companies to shape the workforce in accordance with their and their customers’ needs.

Among the primary issues I plan to explore are:

  • Emerging best practices for recruiting, developing and retaining effective knowledge workforces
    • What approaches are proving to be most effective for companies—especially IT companies—in building and maintaining effective development, sales and services teams?
  • Opportunities for building high-payoff private sector/university partnerships
    • What expectations, contributions and commitments must each party bring to effective relationships, what best practices are emerging for collaborative curricula, course and platform development, research and recruiting?
  • Private sector roles in addressing primary and secondary math and science gaps
    • Although university education is critical, educators must instill interest and teach the basic math and science skills on which university educations can build. What role can IT firms play in enabling and facilitating these efforts? What rewards can they gain?
  • Using technology to improve the education process
    • Which types of technologies and techniques can be most effectively employed in schools and universities and how they can best be acquired, taught, implemented and managed?
  • The roles of IT service providers in addressing customer skills shortages
    • How can IT service providers best help clients evolve their own workforces, supplement their skills gaps and prepare new generations of business architects, technical professionals and CIOs?
  • Building and enabling an “innovation workforce”
    • What are the combinations of technology, management practices, collaborative processes and industry skills that will be required and what role can the IT industry play in developing these skills within companies, in conjunction with universities, and across ecosystems and technology and community clusters?
  • The roles of government in addressing—and exacerbating—the U.S.’s technology skills and innovation gaps
    • Can federal, state and local government organizations play productive roles in laying the foundations for addressing educational needs and enabling potential growth industries, or should they just stay out of the way?
  • The IT industry as test bed and role model for new private sector skills initiatives
    • IT vendors are among the leaders in establishing successful private sector/academic partnerships and in developing systematic employee skills development programs. What role can they play as role models for, enablers of or coaches in helping other industries?

Although my primary interest is in understanding the skills that will be required for sustainable 21st century careers, and the roles that IT companies can play in preparing U.S. knowledge workers for these careers, even I do not live on workforce development alone. After 30 years in the IT industry, I still have a deep interest in, and retain an irresistible drive to express my opinion on any of a broad range of industry-related issues. So, interspersed with blogs about jobs, skills, university programs and the globalization of knowledge work, you can also expect occasional discourses on important IT company initiatives, industry trends and especially, the unique opportunities for IT service providers to address a broad range of business and societal needs.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Community/Other Colleges, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, K-12, Other Schools, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 2 Responses »
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IT Companies as Catalysts in Creating the 21st Century Workforce

Monday, January 11th, 2010

The following is a high-level summary of a more detailed report that summarizes the findings of six months of research into the changing nature of U.S. knowledge work and the requirements for creating a generation of knowledge workers who will not just be able compete, but will not be able to add differentiated value in a global knowledge economy. For a free copy of the full report, click here.

We’ve all seen the statistics and the anecdotes surrounding the declining technical skills of American workers. Although unemployment is at record highs, many positions go fulfilled for lack of qualified applicants. U.S. student interest and skills in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education is plummeting relative to other those in other countries and the U.S. is making it increasingly difficult—and unattractive—for talented foreign students and professions to enter and remain in this country. U.S. manufacturing workers lack the skills to work in new-generation factories and promising green tech firms are leaving the U.S. in favor of countries with larger markets and more sympathetic governments.

Unfortunately, most signs suggest that things will get worse, before they get better.

IT vendors and service providers that are based in or have operations in the U.S. face particular challenges:

  • They will find it increasingly difficult to find sufficient numbers of graduates with appropriate skills and will either have to implement “remedial” programs or increase their use of offshore talent;
  • If IT vendors/providers will have trouble finding skilled people, customer IT organizations are likely to face desperate skills shortages;
  • A decline in math and IT skills among customer’s business professionals threatens to limit appreciation for, experimentation with, and adoption of new IT capabilities.

But while IT vendors face some of the greatest challenges from a U.S. skills gap, they are also the best positioned of any major type vendor to address the problem. These vendors, after all, created and will continue to create the tools that are revolutionizing work. They are also pioneering many of the organizational and business revolutions that transform the work environment of the future. IT companies, for example, have been among the leaders in transforming, automating and optimizing traditional business processes, in disrupting revenue models of traditional industries and in globalizing knowledge work and business processes that few ever dreamed could go offshore.

It’s only logical. Companies that are this involved in shaping and defining the future of knowledge work, are also among the best positioned to understand the skills that tomorrow’s workers will need. Although many such companies are already using their large, established training organizations to directly prepare some of their customers and their partners’ employees, a growing number are going much further.

They are forming increasingly innovative partnerships with universities (and to a lesser extent, all types and levels of schools) to help foster the educating of next-generation employees. Schools, including some that traditionally shunned such collaboration as an infringement on their academic integrity, are increasingly welcoming this help as a means of better preparing their graduates for jobs in one of the most challenging job markets in memory.

These types of partnerships, which can include access to free or low-cost hardware and software, help in designing curricula, courses and Internet-based delivery systems and joint research, are beginning to yield some big benefits to the companies and schools alike. In the end, however, students are probably the biggest beneficiaries.

We are, however, only early in to the second generation of such partnerships. The real benefits—to IT companies, schools, students and to the IT companies’ customers and communities—are still around the corner. So, as discussed in some of our recent articles and reports, some vendors and some universities are already beginning to reap some big strategic and financial dividends from their initial partnerships.

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, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, Innovation/Entrepeneur, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, K-12, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, 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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Microsoft Learning: Adapting to Changing IT Skills Training Realities

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

Microsoft created Microsoft Learning with a mission: to ensure that the lack of available skills is never a barrier to using Microsoft software.

Although the group has always dedicated the vast majority of its education and training attentions and resources to teaching current and aspiring IT professionals to develop, implement and manage Microsoft software, its mission has been evolving. This has been particularly true over the last decade as a result of changes including:

  • The need to expand beyond training IT professionals to develop, implement and manage IT environments and applications, to training business people to use specific Microsoft tools and to teaching students the value of IT tools in all disciplines and endeavors;
  • The dramatic post-IT-bubble decline in interest in IT professions in developing countries, combined with a simultaneous explosion in interest within emerging countries;
  • Schools rapidly growing recession-era interest in teaching (and certifying students in) skills that will directly improve employability by complementing conceptual education with the training of practical skills; and
  • The recession-era trend for students, employees and the unemployed to take greater control of their own careers by proactively developing their skills and preparing for defined career paths.

The company has—and will continue to—adapt its traditional skills training models to accommodate and capitalize on each of these changes. 

From IT Professionals to Students and Business People

Microsoft Learning’s primary objective has always been, and will continue to be the training and certification (2.4 million technology certifications to date) of IT professionals on Microsoft technologies. Although Microsoft has long-since offloaded the sale and delivery of this training to its worldwide network of 1,500 Certified Partners for Learning Solutions, it continues to develop the courseware and manage the certification process.

While many new certifications go to professionals that currently have other certifications, 60% of the 300,000 new professional certifications issued each year are to new entrants. And since college and university students (as well as career changers) now account for a rapidly growing percentage of total trainees, the company is authorizing more academic institutions to deliver training directly to their students.

Although Microsoft will continue to devote the vast majority of its training efforts to current and aspiring IT professionals, the company also wants to ensure that all types of people, across all industries and job functions, understand how to use its personal productivity applications in their daily work. Therefore, the company has developed a wide range of courses to help business users and students more effectively use Microsoft tools in their day-to-day work and has so far certified 2.5 million professionals to support its business products (in addition to the 2.4 million for its technology products). The company, in fact, estimates that it and its partners train 10 times more business users than IT professionals each year.

But since the training of IT professionals is much more complex and detailed, and since IT work is becoming increasingly difficult at a time when productivity applications are becoming easier to use, Microsoft Learning will continue to focus the vast majority of its efforts on IT training.

From Developed to Developing Countries

Like all IT vendors, Microsoft initially focused its training efforts overwhelmingly on those developed countries that accounted for the vast majority of total IT spend. Now, however, emerging countries are dramatically increasing their IT investments. Their demand for IT training, however, is growing even more rapidly than is their demand for hardware and software.

The reasons are two-fold:

  1. The explosive success of India’s IT outsourcing services has prompted dozens of other emerging countries to train large numbers of their own citizens in efforts to replicate India’s success. Certifications are instrumental in allowing offshore service providers to demonstrate their skills and to level the playing field with developed country competitors; and
  2. The tech crash of 2000, combined with the growth in offshoring, dramatically reduced the interest of IT careers in developed countries (and especially in the U.S.), thereby reducing the need for specialized IT training in these countries. Many developed countries, in fact, are already experiencing shortages in key disciplines. 

This double whammy shifted the locus of the IT training market. India, for example, now accounts for 25% of all new Microsoft certifications and other emerging countries, such as China, Mexico, are growing rapidly. Microsoft has recruited new training partners to address these developing country opportunities (including the giant NITT, which trains more than 500,000 people per year across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America) and has formed relationships with hundreds of additional universities.

Schools as Development and Delivery Partners

Microsoft has introduced a number of innovative IT programs (which I will discuss further in future blogs). The Microsoft IT Academy, which it launched in 2007, serves as an umbrella under which the company’s academic IT training offerings (curricula, courseware, software, online learning, certifications, etc.) are aligned. The program, which is primarily targeted at engineering, computer science and related disciplines, has expanded rapidly, encompassing close to 9,000 schools with plans to grow this number five-fold over the next five years.

This program, which adds hands-on, practical experience to the academic education of many curricula, is intended to enhance student employability by adding focus and certifications at special student pricing to the student’s resume and help them deliver immediate value to employers. Microsoft also offers a number of additional services and tools (ranging from career planning tools to resume, cover letter and interviewing guides) plus a newly launched career portal that go even further in helping graduates improve their  employment prospects.  

The company’s academic programs, however, go far beyond the teaching of aspiring IT professionals. The Partners in Learning program is intended to help educators develop and test new methods for using IT tools to enhance education and for highlighting and sharing best practices among schools. It also has a number of programs targeted at college, elementary, middle and high schools students. For example, it provides pre-packaged, online courses to help college students learn to use Excel in business analysis and PowerPoint in presentations. It also offers a number of pre-defined lesson plans to facilitate the learning of specific topics across fields including geography, history, mathematics, science and language. But while Microsoft directly develops the curricula for its IT courses, it relies primarily on schools and other experts to develop non-technical program materials.

Individual-Led Training and Career Development

With the recession prompting a number of companies to cut back on their funding of employee training, growing numbers of employees, students, unemployed workers and independent contractors are taking more active roles in developing their own skills. Microsoft’s new career campaign intends to help these individuals, such as by:

  • Emphasizing the demand for IT skills and certifications, such as by citing independent studies on the current and future demand for IT specialists;
  • Providing justification for individuals to pay for such courses themselves by demonstrating ways in which certifications can help individuals achieve their own career goals (in addition to emphasizing their value to companies);
  • Proactively assisting in career planning by laying out potential career paths and explaining the types of skills, training and certifications that will be required for each step along the way (rather than by focusing on the value of specific courses); and by
  • Distributing up to 1 million free vouchers for select Microsoft eLearning courses and certification exams. 

Into the Future

The future will see more these types of programs. Although the demand for skills training will continue to grow, the type of training, the purchasers of the training and the types of organizations that deliver the training will continue to evolve.

Some of these changes, such as the growing demand from emerging countries and the growing roles of schools in developing and delivering all type of IT training, are long-term trends. Others, such as the decline in corporate spending and the growing role of individuals in planning their own careers and paying for their own courses, were created—or at least exacerbated—by the recession. Such exigencies have prompted Microsoft Learning to take a much more pragmatic approach to positioning and promoting its courses. Its new mantras are for immediate employability and self-directed career development.

While some of these changes may be new, all are likely to shape Microsoft’s education and training programs for years to come. Although the company will continue to focus its primary efforts on the training of IT professionals, it will work increasingly closely with partners—especially all types of educational institutions—to integrate IT more seamlessly into all academic disciplines, curricula and coursework. It will also continue to increasingly position its training materials as providing at least as much value to the individual, as to the employer.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Economic and Political Forces, Education System and Institutions, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, K-12, Microsoft, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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