According to e-Week, Research by
* Duke University
* Rand Corporation
* Rochester Institute of Technology
* Sloan Foundation
* Stanford University
* Urban Institute
* and others
concluded that there is no economic evidence that there is anything
remotely approaching an IT skills shortage despite claims to the contrary,
such as
* Bill Gates recent pleas to Congress for more visas of technology workers.
* Similar claims by head of Intel & other major technology firms
* Gartner research report
not only could they not find any evidence of shortages, but that instead
the evidence is more suggestive of surpluses."
e-Week does address the need for technology workers, who are expert in one
area, to get training to meet needs in other areas.
Excerpts from the article about Duke University's research:
Vivek Wadhwa, a professor for Duke University's Master of Engineering
Management Program, and a former Technology CEO, began to research this
topic after hearing concerns from his students about the job market, given
all the foreign worker and off-shoring competition.
In one study, they asked Human Resource professionals, at top companies
hiring IT workers, about the availability of qualified workers, such as the
number of applicants received for IT jobs, the speed with which these
positions are filled and the overall satisfaction with the employees
eventually hired. Each indicator showed there was no lack of qualified
applicants
Other research found US Colleges are graduating at least double the
computer scientists and engineers than are needed by the US job market.
Additional evidence is the wage scale of IT workers. If there was a
shortage, you would see the pay rate to be spiking, but it has been flat
for years.
All the research has the same conclusion, there is no shortage of educated
IT workers.
Hal Salzman at the Urban Institute explained that the illusion of a
shortage can come from executives who have unrealistic expectations of the
speed with which technology workers can get up to speed with their
particular needs.
"I once had a manager talking about difficulty in finding a Java programmer
with ten years java experience and who he wanted to come into a mid-level
Java position," Salzman said. "Java's been around for what, 12 years now?
There are probably not a lot of these folks around who have that much
experience and who are willing to work at that level."
Universities often claim a shortage, so as to fill up classroom seats with
people able to pay for them.
Other business interests claim a shortage purely for the purpose of
justifying cheaper immigrants workers, instead of working with academia and
IT professionals to identify training needs.
Duke University also studied Engineering irrespective of IT, and found the
same phenomena. The alleged shortage is hype to justify off-shoring jobs
to reduce costs.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9910492
Relevant e-week links include the same Baseline article that Trevor found.
Need technology workers trained for parallel application development that
will be a crucial requirement for the next generation of multicore processors.
.
http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-9256-49-644-437749-889419-0-0-0-1
Mr. Bill Comes to Washington
http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-9256-49-644-437749-889422-0-0-0-1
Google Says Layoffs Are Coming
http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-9256-49-644-437749-889425-0-0-0-1
CFOs Say U.S. Recession Has Begun
http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-9256-49-644-437749-889428-0-0-0-1
Perils of Not Being Parallel
http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-9256-49-644-437749-889431-0-0-0-1
-
Al Macintyre
BPCS/400 Computer Janitor
DB2 Data Glitch Miner
midrange.com
