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 21^st 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 21^st 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.