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IBM National Roadmaps: Creating National Workforce Development Strategies

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

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

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

National Roadmaps

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovation Roadmaps

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

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

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

Where’s the Beef?

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

That is the subject of next week’s blog.

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

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

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

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

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

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

From IT Professionals to Students and Business People

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

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

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

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

From Developed to Developing Countries

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

The reasons are two-fold:

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

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

Schools as Development and Delivery Partners

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

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

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

Individual-Led Training and Career Development

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

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

Into the Future

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

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

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

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