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Occupational Opportunities for the Next Decade

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

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

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

Tomorrow’s Largest Growth Occupations

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

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

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

Both, for example, are:

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

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

IT Professions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

My last blog, Business Analytics as a High-Value Career Opportunity, examined the growth and career opportunities inherent in using analytics to improve business functions and processes. However, analytics applications—and the increasingly powerful tools that enable them—are also creating incredible new opportunities for graduates in a broad range of technical disciplines.

Two leading technology vendors, IBM and Google, in cooperation with a government agency, have taken an important step in helping students prepare for careers in these promising new fields. Not coincidentally, this work will help these vendors enhance the IT architectures, create the application development skills and build a base of developers that will instrumental in creating new-generation computing infrastructures and applications on which these vendors hope to build their own futures.

Building the Foundation for Large-Scale Internet Computing

There is nothing new about large-scale technical computing. Scientists and engineers have long used the world’s most powerful supercomputers to perform complex calculations on huge data sets—the type of computations required to model and visualize complex interactions and simulate outcomes.

What is new is that a growing portion of this work is migrating from huge, expensive and traditionally proprietary supercomputers and software, to distributed, cloud-based architectures that consist of clusters of hundreds or thousands of standard PCs, connected through open standard interfaces, and applications developed with open source tools.

In October 2007, IBM and Google partnered to create the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative, which provided several universities with access to a large cluster running the Hadoop open source distributed computing platform. The companies provided the required hardware, software and services and recruited six leading computer science research organization (University of Washington, Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, Stanford, U of C Berkeley and University of Maryland) to participate in a pilot program. Then, in February 2008, IBM and Google partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide grants to academic researchers to explore large-data architectural issues and create applications that could take advantage of this infrastructure.

Technical Analytics Enablement

As of October 2009, the NSF had awarded $5 million in grants to 14 universities for various research projects.. Most of these projects have a dual goal of:

  1. Improving computer science students’ knowledge of highly parallel computing practices; and of
  2. Spurring research into specific aspects of large-scale, data-intensive cloud cluster architectures and application development.

The first award, to the University of Washington, has the broadest, most foundational goal. It is intended to help jumpstart the widespread teaching of large-scale cluster computing to large numbers of computer science and software engineering teachers and students across multiple undergraduate universities. It is creating a 2.5 day workshop that provides course material and curricular support that professors at undergraduate universities around the world can use to develop their own courses.

Most awards, however, are intended to fund advanced research into specific particularly knotty problems that must be addressed for cloud to become a ubiquitous platform. A number of the initial grants focus on search—the primary horizontal application of cloud technology and the foundation of Google’s market position. For example, Carnegie-Mellon, University of California-Santa Barbara and University of Massachusetts-Amherst were each awarded NSF grants for developing more efficient methods of searching and managing queries across the Web. University of California-Irvine received one for research intended to improve the efficiency and accuracy of fuzzy search queries on large text repositories.

A number of awards were focused on issues that underlie a broad range of high-performance, technical computing problems. Examples include grants to:

  • MIT, Yale and University of Wisconsin-Madison for studies of tradeoffs associated with using different approaches for analyzing and extracting information from very large collections of data across large-scale clusters of parallel computers; and
  • University of California-San Diego for improving the performance of dynamic provisioning of data-intensive applications.

But while most grants focused on broad, infrastructure-related issues, a few delved directly into specific scientific analytic applications. For example:

  • One of the University of Washington’s three projects focuses on astrophysics, particularly the analysis of astronomical images, space-time overlaps and the simulation of collisions of galaxies;
  • University of Washington and University of Utah each won grants for projects that will allow ad hoc, longitudinal query and visualization of massive ocean simulation results at interactive speeds;
  • University of Maryland-College Park is conducting a project to develop parallel algorithms for analyzing DNA sequencing; and
  • University of California-San Diego’s aforementioned dynamic provisioning research will include a focus on protein matching in bioinformatics.

Helping Students—Helping Themselves

The IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative, as mentioned, has an immediate objective of stimulating research into areas that will be instrumental in establishing cloud as a ubiquitous computing platform. A few are intended to promote research into specific technical disciplines—some of which may have direct commercial application, others not.

But regardless of the immediate commercial opportunities, many of these projects will serve as platforms for subsequent research by hundreds of other universities and corporate research labs. Research findings, for example, will be published in scientific journals, and be disseminated though conferences and by graduates who move to other universities and into the private sector. Some of the projects will result directly in usable products, such as code that will be available under open source licenses.

All of these projects, however, address another of the supporting vendors’ longer-term goals—to create a generation of students that understand the value and application, and will help drive the adoption of cloud-based computing.

Some of these students—particularly those in disciplines such as computer science and software engineering—are training to become the systems and application architects of tomorrow. IBM and Google will work with professors to identify the most promising of these students, offer them scholarships and internships, and attempt to recruit them into their organizations. (See my November 11 blog and report on IBM’s Academic Initiative (IBM’s Role in Creating Tomorrow’s Workforce) to understand how such efforts fit into that vendor’s broad employee development strategy.)

But only a small percentage of those students who benefit from the Cloud Computing University Initiative efforts will end up working for IBM or Google. Many are likely to end up in working for IT organizations or for other vendors—including competitors of IBM and Google. Meanwhile, students who learn to apply parallel computing tools to other disciplines, such as astrophysics, biochemistry or environmental studies, are likely to apply these techniques to their own private and public sector careers.

All of these graduates, however, can provide at least indirect benefits to the founding vendors. Those who work in customer IT departments will help drive demand for cloud-based solutions. Even those who join competitors have the potential of helping to expand the overall cloud market.

In the end, however, the founding vendors, and all private and public sector participants in all types of technical research, are likely to gain the greatest value from those students in non-IT-related technical disciplines—those that learn to apply high-performance, cloud-based computing clusters to drive innovation in their own fields. Their work, combined with the expansion of the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative into other academic departments—everything from finance and marketing, though metallurgy and nanotechnology, to architecture and urban planning–will spur new applications, and new innovation in all types of fields.

Although not all this work will directly benefit IBM or Google, it will certainly help to jumpstart the cloud computing market. This will not only provide indirect benefits to the two vendors, it will also create new career opportunities for thousands of IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative graduates plus millions of others that end up in new jobs that will be created by these graduates’ innovations

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, Google, IBM, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 4 Responses »
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Business Analytics as a High-Value Career Opportunity

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

A number of my previous blogs have discussed the importance of quantitative skills in preparing for the jobs of the 21st century. These skills are becoming increasingly critical for all types of jobs in all types of industries. Some industries (such as banking and insurance) and job categories (including accounting, finance and engineering) are almost inherently quantitative.

However, a growing number of jobs—both blue collar and white collar—in virtually every industry increasingly require quantitative skills. This is true whether you are looking for a job in:

  • A marketing department, where you will be increasingly required to interpret customer preferences and trends from vast quantities of real-time point-of-sales data or Internet usage patterns;
  • Government or white-collar law enforcement, such as in identifying hidden patterns to detect increasingly sophisticated fraudulent schemes;
  • A research laboratory, where you are trying to discover the next blockbuster drug or design a green building; or on a
  • Manufacturing plant floor, where employees must continually monitor, interpret and determine how to respond to feedback from increasingly automated, computer-controlled facilities and processes.

While all type of jobs will increasingly require quantitative skills, the highest value, most differentiated use of these skills will be in applying increasingly sophisticated analytics and techniques in a way that will bring new insight to, and in a few cases, totally transform, your particular field. (See, for example, Merv Adrian’s Business Intelligence blog for up-to-date discussions of opportunities and trend. 

Business Analytics Goes Mainstream

Business analytics offer some of the most numerous and diverse of all analytics opportunities for graduates with the requisite skills.

After all, while all companies are already swamped with data, we “ain’t seen nothing yet”. The Internet is spawning as much new data every year as the world has compiled cumulatively, from the dawn of numbers to the invention of computers. Companies are capturing instant information from virtually every consumer transaction and are in the process of “instrumenting” (using sensors to continually capture real-time information from) virtually every type of device in the physical world. Unfortunately, most of this data remains unused and even when executives want to use it, they find the data to be incomplete, inconsistent, incomprehensible or otherwise suspect.

Not surprisingly, vendors from virtually every segment of the IT industry are rushing to help—launching data warehousing solutions, information analysis applications and consulting and outsourcing service offerings.

IBM, for one, has been linking mathematicians and scientists from the company’s research organization with Business Consulting Services consultants for years in an effort to help clients address particularly gnarly problems. It dramatically expanded its own analytics software offerings through acquisitions of companies including Cognos and SSPS. In April 2009, it announced the creation of a new 4,000+ consultant service line—Business Analytics and Optimization Services. This group will use advanced, real-time analytics to help clients across 17 different industries (especially financial services, distribution, industrial, communications and public sector) help clients across 17 different industries (especially financial services, distribution, industrial, communications and public sector) address analytical needs across all business functions (marketing, finance, supply chain, HR, etc.) to drive better, more predictive business decisions and to transform business processes and business models.

IBM is hardly alone among IT vendors in dramatically expanding its business analytics offerings and capabilities. Over the last year, for example:

  • Hewlett-Packard commercialized the data warehousing technologies it inherited from its acquisition of Compaq and combined it with enhanced business intelligence consulting services to create its new Business Intelligence software unit.
  • IT software leaders, including SAP and Oracle, which already had significant analytics capabilities, complemented previous major analytics software acquisitions (Business Objects and Hyperion respectively) with more specialized analytics acquisitions and expanded consulting capabilities.
  • Analytics specialists, such as SAS Institute and a number of smaller firms, including KXEN and Angoss, are being increasingly rumored as acquisition targets of larger firms looking to enhance their own analytics bona fides.

Meanwhile, independent systems integrators, such as Accenture, CSC, Deloitte and Capgemini, are expanding their own analytics services offerings and a growing number of corporations across all industries are developing dedicated analytics staffs and incorporating deeper analytics capabilities across current business units.

Skills Requirements

The dramatic growth in business analytics is creating all types of new career opportunities. For example, it will require highly qualified software architects and developers to create the tools to analyze vast quantities of data and the systems architects to create the increasingly cloud-based systems that will be required to process it.

More importantly, it will require huge numbers of people who understand the type of information that companies will need from the analytics applications and how to capture, present and apply this information to the needs of the business. This requires people with skills in areas including:

  1. Information strategy, as to define a company’s information agenda and determine the type of data that will be required;
  2. Enterprise information integration, to ensure the integrity of information used in data warehouses and analytics applications;
  3. Business performance management, to determine the most effective way to present information to users;
  4. Enterprise content management, to integrate data and workflow into information management strategies;
  5. Advanced analytics, to ensure that information can be used in a way that will allow a company to predict and proactively address needs in real time; and
  6. Business process optimization and transformation, to reinvent processes in a way that will allow the organization to quickly, effectively and efficiently respond to changes and make mid-course corrections.

Most importantly, it will require that virtually every employee, in any function and in any type of organization, must understand the value of analytics to their company, the type of information that will allow them to better perform their jobs, and how to gain access to and make the most effective use of this information.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, IT Industry and Companies, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools | 2 Responses »
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IBM’s Role in Creating Tomorrow’s Workforce

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

My October 5, 2009 blog, Technology Vendors‘ Roles in Addressing the College Conundrum,  assessed some of the primary changes that colleges and universities must undergo to help prepare their students to find and to succeed in the knowledge jobs of the 21st century. It explained the critical roles the private sector can play in helping colleges make these changes and why IT vendors are particularly well suited to help.

My July 27, 2009 blog, How IBM is Helping Universities Develop 21st Century Workforces, provided a high-level overview of IBM’s Academic Initiative and Global University program. I recently completed a deeper examination of IBM’s initiative and wrote a more detailed report (IBM’s Effort to Create the Workforce of the Future) that explained these programs within the context of IBM’s employee development program. In this report, I spelled out the benefits the programs will deliver to universities, students, IBM partners and customers—and to IBM itself. The entire report is available for purchase on my web site. To whet your appetite, here’s a summary of the report’s primary findings.

IBM has been one of the leaders in partnering with universities and other organizations to ensure the availability of the type of IT professionals required to build, run and optimize the types of IT infrastructures and solutions that have become the foundations of 20th century organizations. While it is continuing with these efforts, it is now focusing its primary efforts on partnering with universities and adapting its own employee development models to ensure the availability of a new type of professional—what it calls a “T-shaped person”.

These T-shape people, whether IT professionals, business professionals or public service professionals, must be interdisciplinary generalists, rather than narrowly-focused specialists. Although they must certainly have deep skills in specialty (the vertical axis of the T), they must also have sufficient understanding of a broad range of related disciplines (the horizontal axis) to allow them to see contextual linkages, to constructively participate in interdisciplinary teams and to continually adapt their visions and their contributions to rapidly changing conditions and needs. But whatever the individual’s specialty (whether IT, business, scientific or any other field) all must understand how to apply IT tools to the needs of their profession.

Therefore, IBM is adapting how it works with universities to leverage its traditional relationships with IS, engineering and business departments, into all types of disciplines, from psychology, through public affairs through medicine. These new relationships are multi-faceted, including everything from help in designing courses and curricula; providing required hardware and software; funding research, scholarships and internships; and helping to create interdisciplinary research centers that bring together academics, businesses and government officials to address gnarly problems in areas including transportation, energy, food safety and environment.

IBM’s initial goal in creating T-shaped professionals and research centers is to feed the company’s own need for qualified people. It selects future employees from among this expanded pool of graduates and is adapting the company’s internal employee development programs to transform these interdisciplinary graduates into solution-focused professionals who can proceed through any of five broad career paths.

But if these efforts go as anticipated, they will accomplish much more. They will help promote independent research that is aligned around IBM’s primary market objectives, provide solution-focused employees for IBM customers and partners and ideally inspire a new generation of students to understand how they can use IT (ideally IBM’s IT) to bring new value to their own fields. Ideally, many of these fields will align with the rapidly expanding sets of market needs being addressed under IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative. It can, in other words, be a win-win proposition, helping everybody, with the exception of IBM’s competitors.

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