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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 “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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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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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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Preparing for “Hysteresis” *

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

(*from the Greek “husteros”, which means “late”)

I thought that I fully appreciated the nation’s employment crisis. My thirty year career in the IT industry gave me a unique perspective on the types of skills that are required to drive and market innovation in next-generation industries, how new technologies continually change skills requirements, and the rapid growth in emerging country skills. I saw how these trends, particularly when combined with complementary trends—such as demographics, educational patterns and political pressures—were fundamentally transforming the types of skills that would be required for success in tomorrow’s technology-based, global knowledge economy.

Then came the Great Recession. As if the disconnect between the future needs of the U.S., and current directions wasn’t already troubling enough, the recession made things much worse. Although the nation’s skills gap continues to worsen, the country no longer has the “luxury” of focusing on the skills that would be required for tomorrow’s jobs or the requirements for developing a new-age, globally competitive economy. We must now focus on the requirements for getting people back to work today. And we must do so in an economy in which:

  • Many traditional industry segments and jobs, such as in the automotive, financial services and retail sectors, will never return;
  • Consumers will be forced to reduce spending due to a combination of unemployment, falling wages and shrunken portfolio and home values;
  • All types of spending and investments will be severely retrained by the needs for families, financial institutions, corporations and governments to “de-leverage”; and
  • Big chunks of two generations—Baby Boomers and Millennials—may be all but locked out of the market for meaningful jobs. (see my 8/3/09 blog, Is the Great Recession Creating Two Lost U.S. Generations?

This explosive combination of trends (technology, globalization, demographics, education and the impact that the Great Recession would have on long-term employment opportunities) that prompted me to focus my research and launch my blog on the challenges and requirements for developing sustainable, high-value careers in the 21st century.

But, as well as I thought I understood the new career challenges, a recent article made me realize that even I–who has continually emphasized the profound structural shifts facing the U.S. employment market–may have underestimated the real magnitude of these challenges. This article, written by Joshua Cooper Ramos, managing director of Kissinger Associates for Time Magazine, is “Jobless in America: Is Double-Digit Unemployment Here to Stay?”

The article examines, and generally validates an off-text remark made by Lawrence Summers (who was a Nobel Prize-winning employment theory economist before becoming director of Obama’s National Economic Council) at a July 2009 conference sponsored by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

As Summers discussed, the U.S. economy appears to have passed through an inflection point. Traditional economic models failed to anticipate the pace or magnitude of recent job losses and nobody really knows what will be required to get us back to acceptable levels of unemployment—or even if we will even will be able to get back to acceptable levels. The country has already lost nearly 7 million jobs—the total number of jobs that have been created in the entire decade since 1999—and many economists expect it to take at least five years before this number of jobs will be recovered. (And this does not even begin to account for the 100,000 new jobs that must be created each month to compensate for new job entrants or the 11 million additional people that are currently underemployed, either working fewer hours than they would like or are too discourages to even look for work.)

Summers, it seems, anticipated and coined a term for this type of structural dislocation back in 1986. He called it “hysteresis”—what happens when something snaps in such a way that it can never be put back together—like a light bulb which has been shattered by being dropped on the floor.

Traditional job creation measures cannot rally address these problems. Sure, the government can create temporary jobs—at least until political pressure and the ballooning budget deficit prevent it from funding these make-work jobs. New jobs, such as those in retail and hospitality may fund minimum lifestyles, but won’t create the types of skills required for tomorrow’s high-value jobs. Even growth segments, like nursing and education, will do little or nothing to ensure global competitiveness or generate the foreign exchange required to pay for the nation’s habits.

We already understand many of the types of jobs that will not return to the U.S. as the economy improves, but what type jobs that will take their place? Biotech, GreenTech, NanoTech? Perhaps, someday, but nobody knows for sure.

What should students and disaffected workers do in the interim? I hate to repeat myself, but I will stick with the recommendations I made in two recent blogs:

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Job and Career Opportunities, Political Forces, Societal Forces, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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An Elusive Hope for “H-1B Inaction”

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

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

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

Encouraging Signs

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

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

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

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

The Sad Reality

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, Job and Career Opportunities, Political Forces, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Time for a New Job Search Strategy?

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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