Building a Workforce for the Information Economy (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Sunthesis, Principles, and Recommendations
Sunthesis, Principles, and Recommendations
Pages 273-314
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Part ITI
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Support regional training consortia. Regional training consortia are useful because they help develop the regional workforce.
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They are technologically dynamic, and they have had or been responsible for enormous economic success by any measure. IT is generally regarded as an engine of growth and change across the economy, and there is a growing body of evidence that IT is playing a significant role in improving national productivity, and that any constraints on IT production and support such as those that might arise from excessive tightness in the IT workforce may have a pervasive impact on the growth of the economy.
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, incumbent workers who might otherwise drop out, workers in other fields who might enter IT work if appropriate training is available, currently unemployed workers, "discouraged" workers who do not count in unemployment statistics, and foreign workers who can either be brought to the United States or work in their home countries for U.S. companies.
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Employers, understanding this phenomenon, value job applicants who have a proven track record of such experience. For many of the job areas in which there is tightness today, training sufficient numbers of individuals on a time scale that responds to changes in the market remains a daunting task.
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Based on the available empirical data and a variety of anecdotal testimony, it appears that, on average, older IT workers have different experiences with displacement and possibly with post-displacement income than do younger workers. However, these data do not allow the committee to determine whether the differences indicate age discrimination on the part of employers, legal conduct by employers that may be perceived as discriminatory, personal choices made by individual employees, or the ramifications of a rapidly changing industry.
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· The development side of the IT sector and of IT-intensive industries is particularly dependent on human talent, with the consequence that capital cannot easily be substituted for labor to increase productivity. Research continues on technology-based tools for improving the productivity of IT workers (and indeed, a number of such tools that have increased productivity are now in wide use e.g., integrated development environments for software engineering)
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In general, job applicants tend to view certain structured assessment methods as more fair and less arbitrary than unstructured methods, even if the use of unstructured methods is legally defensible. 8.1.4 On Education and Training (Chapter 7)
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A complaint coming from older workers is that they believe they are more likely to be laid off than younger workers and then, once without a job, they will find it much harder to obtain new employment. · Actions motivated by legitimate business reasons that also have disproportionate adverse effects on older workers do not necessarily constitute illegal age discrimination.
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· Difficulties that older IT workers perceive in finding suitable employment exist largely apart from the availability of H-1B visas, as discussed in Chapter 4. Moreover, elimination of all potential age discrimination in the IT workforce would not likely have a significant impact on tightness in the IT workforce in the long term, although it could have a small, but important, one-time effect.
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· It is the committee's judgment that the use of foreign workers will continue to be necessary for the immediate future, and that foreign workers will continue to make important contributions, but policy governing the use of foreign workers must consider not only the benefits of admitting foreign IT workers but also potential negative effects on the domestic workforce and take steps to ameliorate those negative effects. 8.1.7 On the Use of Temporary Foreign Nonimmigrant Labor (Chapter 5)
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These stakeholders include government policymakers, the IT sector, IT-enabled firms, educational institutions, and individuals. A corollary is that U.S.
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of pursuing such careers must be widely understood. · Educational institutions at all levels must provide (and be given)
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2Some of the other reports that have made some similar recommendations include: · Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, Making IT Better: Expanding Information Technology Research to Meet Society's Needs, 2000; Scaling Up: A Research Agenda in Software Engineering, 1989; More than Screen Deep, 1997; Computers at Risk, 1991; and Trust in Cyberspace, 1999 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press)
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But employers would increase the likelihood of identifying good performers if they used more structured assessment methods, such as structured interviews in which assessors pose the same questions to every applicant and score the results in a uniform manner. One method of structured assessment that may be especially valuable for IT employers is the work sample or simulation.
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Because an individual's formal knowledge becomes useful to the employer only when that individual can apply the knowledge to a business problem, a work sample or simulation is likely to be a better predictor of future job performance than other, decontextualized assessment methods. Work sample and simulation methods can also be used to identify individuals who will perform well in a team setting.
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· Collaborate with other employers to provide opportunities for generic training (i.e., regional training consortia that can be used to train 3Workers located abroad could also be accommodated in this manner. But for some of the reasons discussed in Chapter 5, it is probably easier to use domestic workers who share common cultural and linguistic referents than foreign workers.
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Note that there are well-understood and tested "best practices" for managing the software development process.4 · Provide resources that will allow workers to stay current (e.g., financial support for conferences, journal subscriptions, courses)
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IT employers may also wish to consider the use of applications service providers and industry/enterprise-wide software to reduce personnel requirements, and thus possibly lower the need for IT workers nationally. 8.3.2 For Educational Institutions Improve secondary mathematics education.
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The committee recognizes that most K-16 educational institutions are undertaking efforts in this area but it underscores the importance of creating the widest possible pool of individuals comfortable with using information technology from which IT workers will ultimately be drawn. Better align educational programs in IT with employer needs.
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To the extent that educational institutions can work with professional societies and employers to identify and promote core knowledge and
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Given such difficulties at all levels, educational institutions will have to consider other options such as the following for faculty recruitment: · Make greater use of adjunct faculty drawn from industry. Students benefit intellectually from contact with teachers with intimate knowledge of business needs (as described above)
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. In addition, educational institutions can spread existing faculty expertise across more students by offering courses online, hiring teaching assistants, and increasing the work-based component of the curriculum.
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· When using formal education to learn new skills, IT workers should seek a project or internship in order to obtain experience applying the new skills. Employers are often reluctant to hire those with classroom training but without actual work experience.
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However, these same trends that drive the requirement for continuous learning also encourage high worker turnover and discourage employers from investing in worker training. If one reason that the employment experience of older workers differs from that of younger workers is that older workers lack the up-to-date skills required in this rapidly changing field (a possibility requiring further study)
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States that operate such 10Such actions may also help to relieve perceptions of age discrimination on the part of certain older workers. Because companies may be reluctant to hire individuals who have retrained themselves in new technologies but lack experience in working with them in an on-thejob setting, recent college graduates who have had internship opportunities to obtain work experience that supplements classroom training have an advantage over older workers who would rarely have such opportunities.
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Support regional training consortia. Regional training consortia are useful because they help develop the regional workforce.
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These data must be available more quickly, in more detail, and for larger samples than the government typically collects through surveys such as the Current Population Survey and the Occupational Employment Survey program. Finally, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Labor must improve the data they collect and publish on the role of foreign workers in the IT labor force, including in addition to the categories mentioned abovedata on the previous and subsequent immigration status of H-1B workers.
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Today, state and local governments often allocate funding to public educational institutions on the basis of their full time equivalent (FTE) student enrollment.
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· Assessment tools for IT jobs. As noted in Chapter 6, one of the impediments to the use of structured assessment methods in IT is that their administration is resource-intensive.
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Comprehensive and effective reform of law and policy regulating the use of foreign workers in the United States depends on a statutory and regulatory apparatus that does not introduce excessive delay in the processing of individual workers. As noted earlier, employers turn to Me H-1B 13One study undertaken by the National Science Foundation (Curtis, Kent.
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Based on these problems with the program, the committee makes the following recommendations: · H-1B visas should be more portable than they are today, thus allowing H-1B workers to change jobs more easily.l5 Today, H-1B workers cannot change jobs unless and until a new employer files an H-1B petition accompanied by a new labor certification application. In addition, if an H-1B worker who wishes to obtain permanent residency changes employers, is promoted such that his or her job duties change, or relocates with the same employer, he or she may have to start the green-card process all over again, may lose his or her original priority date,l6 and may not complete the process prior to the expiration of his or her H-1B status.
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Recognizing these problems with the current green-card process, the committee recommends that it be reformed according to the following policy principles: 1. The green-card process must be streamlined in a way that significantly reduces labor certification processing and limits total processing times to a time scale of a year or so, rather than the current total of 5 to 8 years.
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At the same time, the current situation, in which the H-1B cap is reached early in the fiscal year, resulting in INS freezing H-1B approvals until the following October and using H-1B numbers from the next year's allotment to satisfy pent-up demand from the prior year, is unacceptable. In order to alleviate this problem, it may be worth considering approaches that either distribute allocation of the visas throughout the year or that move away from the notion of a fixed numerical cap.l8 Finally, the committee urges policymakers to look ahead several years and consider the effect of having increased the numbers of H-1B visas 17For example, the DOL recently published in the Federal Register general principles that will "guide the development of proposed regulations to effectuate the redesign [of the labor certification process]
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As described in Chapter 3, the federal government faces a number of specific challenges when seeking to recruit and retain IT workers, including an inability to match private sector compensation, an impending retirement bulge, and a statutory inability to tap foreign workers for certain sensitive positions. In addition to some of the actions (mentioned above)
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laboratories. Such programs can provide more flexibility, such as signing bonuses, entry at higher than normal civil service positions, substantial bonuses to outstanding workers, and rapid promotion.20 · Update the occupational structure of IT work done in federal service.
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Telecommuting, flex time, and flex place are standard practice at many companies. Some of these programs are implemented ad hoc in the federal government, but more systemic utilization of new business work models could motivate workers to join or remain in government service.
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Loosening these restrictions will increase the pool of qualified workers available to work on government contracts and help companies to maintain the skills of their employees.21 The government should continue to innovate in the area of contracting as it has over the past few years and should continue to make greater use of off-the-shelf hardware and software, rather than more expensive and inflexible custom programming. Agencies should take advantage of contracting vehicles that have become much more flexible, allowing government managers to reward good contractor performance and not make awards to contractors with bad records, even though their bid price may be low.
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Stimulating youth interest in IT careers has, of course, long been the province of relevant professional societies, and concern about labor market tightness has further stimulated such efforts. The Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which represent both Category 1 and Category 2 IT workers, as well as other organizations more focused on Category 2 IT workers, have long been involved in planning for education, mentoring, and youth outreach, including programs for disadvantaged youth as well as youth generally.
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However, to the extent that groups underrepresented in IT are underrepresented because they have not been attracted to IT work and/or had the appropriate educational and training experiences, government, employers, and educational institutions all have particular roles to play. The following list of actions to be taken by some or all of these parties is derived largely from a paper originally intended to address the issues of women in IT careers;23 however, the list is applicable with minimal modification to members of all underrepresented groups.
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Reports of harassment, of "chilly classrooms," and of cultural mismatches for underrepresented groups are frequent in some industrial and educational settings. These problems are not unique to IT, but a tight labor market and declining participation by female students make these issues urgent to address.
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Prepublication—Subject to Further Editorial Correction appendixc.doc 10/21/2000 2:33 PM 1nclua~ng The enects of~technology on women's jobs and We reasons for the expansion of parttime and contingent work arrangements in the United States. She is Me author of Back to Work: Determinants of Women's Successful Reentry (1981~.
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