"Billy, you've been a fine
son, but it's time for a change.
I found a child overseas
who can do it cheaper."
Posted on 03/08/2007 12:35:23 PM PST by SirLinksalot
Down To Business: Talent Shortage ? Employers Must Take Some Of The Rap
Many tech pros are demoralized, thanks to knee-jerk offshore outsourcing and the post-bubble malaise. Employers must move beyond the "you should be happy you have a job" mentality.
By Rob Preston InformationWeek
March 3, 2007 12:00 AM (From the March 5, 2007 issue)
Ask a dozen CIOs and tech vendor CEOs to identify their single most pressing challenge, and you'll likely get at least 10 different answers, right? Not exactly. In fact, they all come back to one overarching concern: finding, grooming, and retaining tomorrow's leaders.
I wrote a column on this subject last May, after five CEOs, in separate conversations, expressed their frustration with U.S. immigration policy, the U.S. education system, and other trends that influence their future labor pool. All these execs say they're preoccupied with building their next-generation tech workforces amid a looming talent shortage in the United States. I subsequently heard similar rumblings from six or seven CIOs.
A vast right-wing conspiracy? More like fear and loathing in tech America. The U.S. workforce is aging, and there aren't enough computer science and other technical college grads to replace retirees. It's still hard to get a U.S. work visa, and foreign nationals graduating from U.S. universities increasingly are returning home or heading to other countries.
The Technology CEO Council, an advocacy group that includes the chiefs of Dell, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, and Sun Microsystems, last week called on the White House and Congress to grease the labor supply skids. Among their seven proposals for improving U.S. competitiveness were two related to the tech workforce: Increase funding for recruiting and developing math teachers, and change immigration laws to make it easier for foreign IT pros to work in the United States.
This column has long argued that the more talented technical people we can develop in, and attract to, this country, the better for the economy and its people--vendors, IT organizations, consumers. However, this looming labor shortage isn't just a straight supply problem. It's also an HR embarrassment. Instead of just wringing their hands about their labor challenges, employers need to look in the mirror.
For one thing, "employee engagement" is near an all-time low, observes Tom Casey, VP of human capital at the Concours Group. That's management consulting speak for the fact that tech pros are demoralized, thanks to knee-jerk offshore outsourcing and the post-bubble malaise. Many of their employers hail from the "you should be happy you have a job" school of management. As a result, Casey says, IT pros are all-too-anxious to switch companies, even careers. And given the market uncertainly, they're advising their kids to steer clear of the profession--at least according to many disillusioned readers who responded to my last column.
Casey also sees a mismatch of skills at play. IT pros were reared to be functionally technical but not strategic or innovative. But employers, who now expect their IT people to be both tech and business savvy, aren't investing in training and other programs to pull them along.
Sweeping government programs are all well and good, but individual employers must step up as well. Casey advises every business technology organization to conduct a comprehensive workforce study to identify weaknesses. For example, if your IT workforce is aging and your company's marginalizing or sunsetting those older workers, then it needs to rethink its HR approach. If it lacks certain expertise, consider building that in-house, under formal programs.
Companies must recruit differently as well. One idea Casey suggests: Look to local country clubs for retirees willing to put their business technology experiences and skills back to work part time. Overall, the "if we need them, we'll just go find them" employer mentality won't cut it anymore. Be proactive.
Meantime, if you can't find the right job but insist you have all the right skills and are doing all the right things (a common refrain among readers), "take a good look at the jobs you're pursuing and the competencies that you have," Casey says. "You need to consider re-inventing yourself"--yes, new skills, new locations, new industries. Employees must step up as well.
Rob Preston, VP/Editor In Chief INFORMATION WEEK
Many Filipinos want to become an American state or states, as they are fed-up with the corruption of their government and poverty. They have even formed a political party for this purpose.
Cool! They should be encouraged. This is the first I heard of it.
I would think Mexicans should think the same way instead of just wanting to make enough money here to become oppressors back in the cesspool.
""My COBOL/FORTRAN/Burroughs' skills aren't good enough...." How about EZTRIEVE, big market for that!"
Wonder if my DBase3 and Novell CNE3 skills are needed anywhere?
"talent shortage" bump
And once they become part of USA they will be cured of these ills?
IT personnel need to market their solutions better.
I look at it this way: If a corporate IT department was instead an independent business, how would it sell its solutions? What value-add would it offer, versus the competition? Could the IT department survive on its own as an independent business?
I believe there's a growing opportunity for high-school nerds looking for employment before college. In fact, I wonder if about 90% of all IT work could be done by smart high school kids?
Well, if every corporate application package is running on Google's servers, and the only IT knowledge your company needs is how to start a web browser and go to Google, then maybe IT departments as we know them will become thing of the past.
It's long overdue for large employers to take responsibility for their actions.
There's no problem so great that a government program can't make it even worse.
Uh, hate to break it to ya, but the Philippines were a U.S. protectorate from the end of the Spanish-American war to their independence as a "commonwealth" of the United States in 1935. That changed to "independence" in 1946, but the U.S. had veto power over foreign policy and military affairs of the islands until 1973.
If we couldn't cure them of corruption over that amount of time (and we didn't, we left the disgusting creep Marcos in power), it ain't gonna work any better this time.
For better or for worse, they need to solve their own problems, the major one being getting rid of the infection known as Spaniard culture which they had for the better part of 300 years, and are still trying to shake.
Well, the company I work for does a lot of batch processing using Foxbase, and our main file and print server is a NetWare 6 box, so you've at least got the rudimentry skills for the company I work for! lol. No, you can't have MY job!
Mark
BUMP
I hadn't run across Nova assembly language, so your remark made me curious. From a few searches, it certainly is an unusual assembly language for a unique machine. This Nova feature particularly seemed unique:
(From Data General NOVA ® Instruction Set Summary at Carl Friend's Minicomputer "Museum".)Magic and Reserved Memory Locations on the Nova
The basic Nova architecture isn't too big on reserved locations or ``magic'' locations, but there are a few. Locations zero and one in physical memory are reserved for the interrupt system, and there are a bank of ``special'' locations in the auto-increment and auto-decrement areas. I'll describe those here. Later machines, of course, have more reserved locations, but those are beyond the scope of this document.
Locations 20 through 37 (octal) in the logical address space (there may be two location 20s in MAPped machines) behave in a special manner when accessed indirectly. When hit via an indirection operation, these locations either increment by one or decrement by one automatically before the value is taken to be used in the effective address. 20 through 27 are the auto-incrementing addresses and 30 through 37 are the auto-decrementing ones. They behave normally when accessed directly. This makes them useful for traversing lists and areas of core.
Which is it? Develop internally, or bring in outsiders? And why bring outsiders in, when you can just outsource to where they live now?
All my in-laws would vote yes in a heartbeat.
yep
Read a biography on Genereal MacArthur...pretty interesting how things setup after WWII are still haunting the Philippines...it's too bad MacArthur was too busy running Japan to look out for PI....his family was involved in Philippine politics going back to the turn of the century....it's sad for a lot of good filipinos...they are powerless and many filipinos i know would cheer if the US invaded and took over.... MacArthur always regretted not rebuilding PI like he did Japan....just my thoughts.
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