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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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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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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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Technology Vendors’ Roles in Addressing the College Conundrum

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

My September 27 blog, Leveraging University Education into Careers for the New Economy, suggested how college students can structure or supplement their coursework to make them more attractive to potential employers. Many of these approaches, such as selecting appropriate majors and minors, independent study programs and thesis topics and developing strong social networking competencies, are generally within students’ own control. (Even these approaches, however, are dependent on the college/universities’ ability to fund these classes—a condition that can no longer be assumed.)

However, while many of the requirements for creating university experiences that will better prepare students for the knowledge jobs of the future are within the control of students, many others will depend on proactive efforts by the colleges. These include:

  • The teaching of math, statistics and the use of IT tools as core academic offerings and the deep integration of these tools into all coursework;
  • An increasingly interdisciplinary design and delivery of courses; and
  • Availability of proactive career counseling to help students identify career options, career pathways and the types of work that will best prepare students for opportunities in their chosen fields.

Unfortunately, many of these changes are totally antithetical to many universities’ organizational structures and cultures. For example, as I discussed in my previous blog, most universities are organized in discrete stovepipes that implicitly discourage cross-disciplinary collaboration. Professors, meanwhile, are typically hired and rewarded on the basis of their depth of knowledge in their particular specialty (rather than as interdisciplinary thinkers) and many consciously shun practical applications of their work and involvement of corporations in tuning curricula. On the other hand, most university career centers are culturally attuned to these objectives. However, they often lack the number of career counselors and the degree of interaction with the companies most likely to hire their graduates.

What’s a university to do? How can it overcome the inherent challenges of culture, tenure and a lack of resources to provide their students with the help required to prepare them for the careers of the future?

One approach is for universities to actively solicit the help of corporations that are in a position to hire graduates. Many corporations already have large, well established and very active university relationship programs. Some, such as JP Morgan Chase and Wal-Mart, help universities (Syracuse University http://globaltech.syr.edu/ and the Universities of Arkansas and Arizona respectively http://sustainability.uark.edu/15347.php) develop and fund programs under which the university creates and teaches courses and conducts research that are aligned to the company’s needs, and the companies provides internships and job opportunities for selected graduates.

But while all type of companies in virtually every industry offer programs to help universities prepare students for new jobs, as explained in my September 5 blog, The IT Vendor’s Employee Readiness Burden, I believe that IT vendors are particularly well suited to help. Why? Through their products and practices, these vendors are playing disproportionately large roles in shaping the environments in which tomorrow’s graduates will work. These vendors, for example, are developing the technologies that will redefine the nature of knowledge work and pioneering practices, such as globalization and seamless collaboration that will determine the type of students who will be best suited for different types of work. Just as importantly, IT vendors will also have some of the first and greatest needs for graduates with these new skills.

I recently wrote a report (IBM’s Role in Creating the Workforce of the Future) which talks about how IT vendors are helping universities in a myriad of ways. I’ll also continue to follow this topic in future blogs.

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, Global Forces-General, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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How IT Services Providers Can Help Clients Address the Coming IT Skills Gaps

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

The growth of the IT industry has depended on broad availability to people with IT skills-people to work both at IT vendor and customer organizations. Although it may be tempting to scoff at the emergence of a skills gap during a period characterized by a combination of recession (when companies are being forced to lay off and defer the hiring of qualified people) and globalization (with a huge growth of IT skills in India, China and dozens of other emerging countries), three fundamental trends will combine to jeopardize the availability of the type of skills that will be required to allow developed country companies (especially U.S., Western Europe and Japan-regions on which IT vendors still demand for the vast majority of their revenues and profits) to effectively apply IT to addressing the business needs of their companies. These trends are:

  1. Demographics, a combination of a dearth of Gen X and Y’ers to replace retiring baby boomers, insufficient transition planning by many companies, and simultaneous declines in both the percentage of young adults graduating from colleges and, especially, those majoring in IT or other technical curricula.
  2. Globalization, whereby the rapid growth of offshore labor supplies and skills (and the pressures this will impose on developed country entry jobs and salaries) will initially reduce both the attractiveness of IT careers and, longer term, jeopardize the development of the type of higher-level skills that developed countries will need to mange their own environments and, most importantly, effectively apply IT to their company’s business needs.
  3. Industrialization/Automation, in which lower-level entry tasks (those that are instrumental in helping people learn the foundation skills that are necessary to learn higher-level skills) will increasingly be instantiated into software.

At first glance, it may appear that the combination of 2 and 3 will address the shortfalls created by 1. Moreover, the combination of all three of these trends could very well result in IT organizations that are much more cost-efficient -and effective-than are traditional organizations.

But while the globalization and Industrialization of IT work will certainly reduce the demand for IT-trained “bodies” in the U.S., it will simultaneously reduce the supply of people trained to provide the types of high-level skills that are required to:

  • Architect and manage sophisticated projects and, most importantly, those that best understand how to
  • Apply IT as a tool to address business needs and achieve strategic advantage.

From where will such skills come? True, offshore sources may well produce many of the architectural and managerial skills required to offset a dearth of developed country skills. Although companies may prefer to retain these and other high-level IT skills onshore, many can probably make do with offshore talent. And since few end user organizations are likely to have the scale or the best practices required to build, staff and manage world-class offshore IT organizations, they may even be able to justify outsourcing these functions to third-party providers.

But what about that mix of deep business process, IT architectural and business strategy skills, combined with the type of corporate cultural sensitivity, that is required to identify and sell the need for, and align the types of organizational resources required to drive such projects to fruition? Such capabilities cannot be offshored, much less outsourced. How will developed countries in general, and individual companies in particular, recruit, develop, nurture, manage and retain such skills? Even more fundamentally, what type of skills should companies look for in people who can grow into these roles, where are such skills being taught, what career paths are most effective in developing these skills and what cultures are required to develop skills into talents?

True, the “mere tasks” of increasing college graduation rates, the percentage of students who major in IT and related disciplines and the quality of the educations these students receive, may well increase the pool of raw materials from which such talent may be developed. But the use of such blunt instruments to increase the genetic probabilities of creating the new generation of such talent is not an effective or efficient means of developing these skills. This is particularly true given a probable decline in the number of entry jobs from which such students can percolate to the top.

Neither the country, nor individual companies need huge numbers of raw skills-they need a totally new approach to selective breeding on the type of talent that will be required for the skills that businesses really need to be competitive in the future. They need entirely new types of education, entirely new career paths and entirely new ways of looking at the type of value that IT must provide in a more global knowledge-based economy. 

Since IT vendors in general, and IT service providers in particular, are playing such key roles in driving the  globalization and industrialization/automation tends, they are best positioned to determine the ways in which these trends will redefine the needs for next-generation IT skills. And since they have so much to gain from the availability of such skills-and so much to lose from death of these skills-they have huge incentives to help create them.  Some, as I will discuss in future reports, are already working to define and help universities create the foundation for these new skills.

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, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, IT Industry's Role, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | 1 Response »
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Why the Private Sector Must Develop a Socially Responsive Workforce Globalization Policy

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

The U.S. in general, and U.S. businesses in particular, are understandably preoccupied with the need to reinvigorate business and get American workers back to work. While a lot of attention has been focused on ensuring that the jobs created by government stimulus dollars create jobs in America, rather than in other countries, a lot less thought has been given to another fundamental question:

How many of those jobs that are created in the U.S. will be sustainable, and how many will migrate offshore—pushing newly employed workers back onto the unemployment lines?

Businesses are increasingly caught between the proverbial rock and hard place. On one hand, these companies must continue to grow their businesses and maintain profitability. On the other hand, they desperately want to maintain loyalty to their employees and their communities. These companies are increasingly being forced to look to offshore or foreign-based employees as a means of:

  • Gaining access to the best people—especially technical people—at a time when fewer U.S.-born students are studying science, engineering, math and IT (SEMIT) and the supply of offshore and other foreign-born graduates is exploding;
  • Protecting themselves from lower-cost competitors who already rely on offshore employees; and
  • Building emerging country presences to capitalize on markets that are expected to grow at 2-3 times the rate of the U.S. and other developed country markets.

The country is reluctantly coming to grips with the fact that the majority of blue-collar manufacturing jobs will inevitably move offshore. We have spent the last five decades helping our children prepare for the jobs of the future—a.k.a. knowledge jobs—and retraining displaced blue collar workers for these jobs. Indeed, 75% of U.S. jobs are now in services and more than 60% of these consist of some form of knowledge jobs.

But what happens when these knowledge jobs go offshore? Services offshoring has moved far beyond call centers and IT application maintenance. Accounting, financial analysis, market research, medical diagnostics, legal research and medical diagnostics jobs are all going offshore. So too is cardiac surgery and R&D—the “seed corn” for business growth. China, in fact, is now the most popular location in the world for establishing new R&D hubs and India is the third most popular (after the U.S.). Where will the next secure, high-value U.S. careers come from? What do we train our children for?

Although no one yet knows the answers to these or dozens of other key questions, that has not delayed calls for urgent action. These include proposals and laws that will:

  • Slash the number of H-IB visas;
  • Make it more difficult for foreign students to enter and remain in the U.S.;
  • Forbid companies working on government contracts or receiving government funds to hire non-U.S. citizens; and
  • Tax unrepatriated foreign income.

And all this is before the issue surrounding the offshoring of knowledge jobs has even become a public hot button. What will happen when the public really understands the implications of living in a global knowledge economy? The jobs that will be lost and never created? The compression of U.S. salaries? The confusion surrounding (if not the actual loss of) career options for students and employees?

The reaction will almost certainly surpass that to the globalization of manufacturing jobs. And while the intensity may not reach the level surrounding financial service bonuses, it will last much longer. After all, society and parents have been preparing children for the decline of the manufacturing industry for years by pushing them to prepare for a secure, well-paying knowledge job by going to college. What will happen when large numbers of the highest-end knowledge jobs begin to disappear—and nobody has a clear vision as to the types of jobs that will replace them?

Companies and executives that offshore such jobs will be vilified. Political remedies will almost certainly be draconian.

What’s the private sector to do? Although it will be tough for business to portray the globalization of knowledge work as a positive for American workers, it cannot afford to hunker down with the hope that the PR/political storm will never materialize, or to ride it out.

However, the private sector does have the potential of partially defusing the GKE time bomb—and simultaneously helping to educate and enlist the support of some powerful government allies. How? My next post will provide a playbook describing some of the primary actions the private sector can take to protecting its employees and communities, while simultaneously protecting its customers and shareholders.

For much more on this topic, see my report Why the Private Sector Must Develop a Socially Responsive Workforce Globalization Policy.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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