<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER  No. 1808 -- 1/15/2008 >>>>>

If there is one book I won't waste my time reading any time soon it will be
the one titled: "2020 Meltdown: Solving the Impending Jobs Crisis", by Ed
Gordon. I do however recommend reading the review of the book because it's
so idiotic it's entertaining.  As you might have guessed, the book makes
the case for a shortage of high tech workers by the year 2020.

Marilyn Nagel at Cisco Systems is interviewed and talks about how desperate
her company is to keep women from leaving the workforce. The inference
given is that there must be a shortage of high-tech workers if Cisco is
willing to take desperate measures to hold onto their workforce. You gotta
love some of the ideas Nagel is coming up with to keep female programmers
from leaving Cisco -- like cutting back on their 80 hour work weeks!

   "We're looking at bringing in a couple of high-level IT women who
    want to work but are not willing to commit to the 80-hour type
    weeks that we tend to have in IT," Nagel said


Just a thought: If the women at Cisco now get to slack off their 80 hour
work weeks, will the men have to work extra hours to make up the
difference? If so, will Cisco provide beds in each cubicle?


The elitist view of offshoring is particularly insulting, especially for
Americans that might want those $20 an hour call center jobs, or perhaps to
those that wanted to hold onto their high-tech or manufacturing jobs. If
this is to be believed, only lousy jobs are offshored:

   Imported models. American companies used globalization to get rid
   of low-pay, low-skill jobs that could be done elsewhere, especially
   India.


The Meltdown book goes much further than declaring shortages of Americans
-- it also warns that we are going to have shortages of H-1Bs. Supposedly
that will happen as foreign engineers realize they can get paid just as
much in India as the U.S. Of course this "shortage" of H-1Bs wouldn't
happen if US employers weren't so anxious to exploit foreign workers as
cheap labor.

   In addition, U.S. companies have hired high-wage, high skill
   people they have not found in the United States, and they have
   imported foreign workers with H-1B visas to fill positions in
   STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers. The
   challenge will be that the countries America is importing from
   are becoming richer as their own economies develop. These
   imported workers are being called home, especially as wages rise,
   where they can earn more money and be with their families.


This statement is so ridiculous I need no further comment:

   Still more labor competition will come, Gordon said, when
   Europeans move production facilities to the United States
   because they can't find enough workers.


The book discusses the aging of the workforce. That may be the dumbest part
of the book, at least judging by the review of it!

I almost jumped off my chair in laughter when I read that baby boomers are
workaholics. Gee, that's funny because I'm a boomer and when I was a kid we
were constantly told that my generation was nothing but a bunch of
self-centered brats that had no work ethic because all we wanted to do is
to watch sitcoms on our black-and-white TVs. Now we have a new generation
to put the blame on, and this article certainly does that. Apparently there
is a shortage of GenXers who are willing to put in 80 hour work weeks like
the boomers.

   The challenge is the generational disconnect between the older
   Baby Boomers and the younger generations X and Y. Boomers, who
   are more likely to be workaholics, have a very different outlook
   on the quality of work life. The younger generations are more
   family oriented and crave more work-life balance.


So, according to this article, Americans are getting too old to work and
therefore need to be replaced by younger (i.e. cheaper) workers. To make
things almost a comedy of the absurd, check out this very obvious logical
error -- companies are supposedly worried about worker shortages and yet
they show little concern for the workers they already have, especially
older workers.

   An alarming 78 percent of employers that Manpower talks to are not
   worried about the impact of aging workforce on their place of
   business. In addition, only 18 percent of employers that Manpower
   talks to have a strategy to recruit older workers, and only 28
   percent have a strategy to retain them.

Not mentioned here is that only 28% have a strategy to retain older workers
because the other 72% intend on firing them!

The book claims that employers are very worried about transferring the
experience and knowledge of their older workers to their younger workers.
That's because once the forced retirements begin the experienced workers
are escorted out the front door. Of course what the author fails to
recognize is that companies could solve the problem by retaining older
workers, and then there wouldn't be a shortage.

   Holmes said employers should pay attention to the demographics of
   their workforce so they have a sense of how many workers will be
   eligible for retirement and when, and plan to transfer the lifetime
   of knowledge that otherwise would walk out the door to younger
   generations of workers. This can be done through formal training
   programs, job shadowing, mentoring, or other programs where mature
   workers are charged with imparting what they know to younger
   generations.


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://wistechnology.com/article.php?id=4433

Workforce shortage is real, but solutions must be creative
By Joe Vanden Plas  01/14/08  © WTN Media. For personal use only. No mass
duplication or distribution.

Madison, Wis. - Ed Gordon believes the labor pool is out of whack with the
labor marketplace, and he has written what he hopes will become a wake up
call for American employers and workers.

In the view of Gordon, author of The 2020 Meltdown: Solving the Impending
Jobs Crisis, the forthcoming IT workforce shortage is a legitimate worry.
Millions of Americans who are unemployed do not have the right talent for
the jobs that need to be filled, with many people earning college degrees
that are not translating into decent employment. There now are four million
jobs empty, Gordon said, and half of them are highly skilled positions that
require specialized technology training and education.

"The issue is that the labor market is out of sync with the realities of
the global marketplace with the jobs we are creating and the jobs that are
disappearing," Gordon said. "This is a problem all over the U.S. and most
of the developed world."

Gordon is not the only one sounding the alarm. Melanie Holmes, vice
president of World of Work Solutions for Manpower, said in early 2007, 41
percent of the American companies Manpower surveyed said they were having
trouble filling positions - not just in science and technology, but also
across the board

"That is a historically large number," she said.

Convergence of forces

Gordon said the situation is being exacerbated by specific social and
economic forces converging at the same time. The most prominent is that
technology is becoming more pervasive in every facet of life, and since
technology is complex, people use it in ways that support or create new
products and services.

If there is one mitigating circumstance regarding the IT worker shortage,
it's that companies are loading up on technology and they want fewer
workers to do more. The trend is offset somewhat by the increased
efficiency enabled by technology, but that requires talented people. They
must be highly literate, and they need specialized technology training.

"Only 25 percent of the workforce comfortably fits into that category, but
75 percent of the jobs we're creating demand it," Gordon said.

Those other 75 percent, many of whom are high school dropouts, don't have
the right talent mix. Some were trained in old technologies that now are
obsolete and have gone away. Some have college degrees, but they are
degrees in communication, finance, and marketing, where there already are
far too many people for the number of available jobs.

At the same time, we have too many "techno peasants," who Gordon
characterized as people with low levels of literacy, plus no specialized
career preparation, who are confined to low-wage jobs for the rest of their
lives. Until last 20 years, there were fairly good-paying jobs, mostly in
industrial settings, that did not require high levels of literacy. Those
jobs since have gone by the wayside, and new technology requires higher
levels of literacy, specialized skills, and career preparation.

With that in mind, Gordon believes society is divided into three groups.

• Smart people with right talent who keep their skills up to date through
networking, seminars, and simply reading books. These workers keep
shifting. Most mature workers are not doing the exact same things they did
when they were young, and so they had to update their knowledge and apply
it in new ways. Given the increasing complexity of technology, this trend
will continue to accelerate because people will need more education, not
less.

• Younger people who have been steered away from technology fields. In
2010, a tsunami of 79 million Baby Boomers will start to leave the
workforce, and about 60 percent of the jobs that must be filled now are
occupied by Baby Boomers that will need to be replaced. Many Boomers have
the technical skills to keep the economy running, and they represent a
larger cadre of people with more technical skills than the generations
behind them, who were told that tech jobs weren't cool and don't pay
enough. "They love technology - they eat it and breath it," Gordon said,
"but they don't want to design it, make it, repair it, or manage it. The
sad part is we need a certain proportionality of these generations to
become involved.

• Imported models. American companies used globalization to get rid of
low-pay, low-skill jobs that could be done elsewhere, especially India. In
addition, U.S. companies have hired high-wage, high skill people they have
not found in the United States, and they have imported foreign workers with
H-1B visas to fill positions in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Math) careers. The challenge will be that the countries America is
importing from are becoming richer as their own economies develop. These
imported workers are being called home, especially as wages rise, where
they can earn more money and be with their families.

Still more labor competition will come, Gordon said, when Europeans move
production facilities to the United States because they can't find enough
workers.

Maturation process

Communities will need to retain older workers in the STEM areas and rebuild
the pipeline of young people, Gordon said. The challenge is the
generational disconnect between the older Baby Boomers and the younger
generations X and Y. Boomers, who are more likely to be workaholics, have a
very different outlook on the quality of work life. The younger generations
are more family oriented and crave more work-life balance.

Manpower's Melanie Holmes said businesses should focus on the aging worker
as part of the problem and the solution.

An alarming 78 percent of employers that Manpower talks to are not worried
about the impact of aging workforce on their place of business. In
addition, only 18 percent of employers that Manpower talks to have a
strategy to recruit older workers, and only 28 percent have a strategy to
retain them.

"They are not going to start worrying about it until they start feeling the
pain, but by then it will be a little late," Holmes said.

Companies should have strategies in place to recruit and retain mature
workers, especially given that life expectancy will encroach well into 80s,
and the average retirement age now is 62.

"What will they do for the next 30 years?" Holmes asked. "The AARP
(American Association of Retired Persons) research says people plan to work
past retirement age, so companies should have strategies in place to
recruit and retain their mature workers."

Specifically, they should recruit mature or retired workers from the
outside, and make sure their employment practices are age-friendly or
age-neutral to help retain older workers. For first time in history, four
generations are working together, so all companies need to be careful about
age bias and make sure all generations get along in the workplace.
Diversity programs should include generational diversity issues so people
learn how to work with different generations.

To encourage workers not to go "cold turkey" at 65, flexible work options
can give them the incentive to continue working by either telecommuting,
working part-time, or job sharing. Another carrot is to leverage their
expertise nine months out of the year, and allow them to take summers off.

Holmes said employers should pay attention to the demographics of their
workforce so they have a sense of how many workers will be eligible for
retirement and when, and plan to transfer the lifetime of knowledge that
otherwise would walk out the door to younger generations of workers. This
can be done through formal training programs, job shadowing, mentoring, or
other programs where mature workers are charged with imparting what they
know to younger generations.

Employers also should be using their "alumni," but that requires keeping in
touch with them after they leave. Like those who retire directly from the
company, alumni can be used for training and mentoring, project work, and
consulting engagements.

Passing the torch isn't the only business consideration, Holmes noted.
"Many IT organizations, especially those with lots of legacy applications,
really are going to be in trouble when mature workers leave," Holmes sated.
"None of the young employees will want to learn old systems, and they will
have to replace them."

Diversity rules

Marilyn Nagel, director of diversity and inclusion for Cisco Systems, said
getting more women into the STEM disciplines is a matter of providing job
flexibility options. She said Cisco has been interviewing women, finding a
number of reasons why they leave the workforce, and learning what would
lure them back. Some of the lures would be flexible work options, so the
ability to flex their hours, work from home, or work part time is
paramount.

"We're looking at bringing in a couple of high-level IT women who want to
work but are not willing to commit to the 80-hour type weeks that we tend
to have in IT," Nagel said. "So we're giving them options to say, 'You want
to work 30 hours, you want to work 20 hours, balancing some work-life
issues, what could we do to make it more palatable to you?'"

Nagel, who spoke before the December 2007 meeting of Accelerate Madison,
said Cisco also is looking to let women "off ramp" for two years, and come
back after their children have grown so they don't have to start over. "We
know when women off ramp and they come back into the work force, they often
can't get jobs near the level or pay where they were," she said.

"I think it absolutely takes creativity [to lure them back]."

That creativity has removed the nation's overall lack of broadband
deployment as a barrier to work flexibility. At Cisco, everyone is given
company-financed broadband access in the home. An employee with a scheduled
call in India at 9 p.m. is not expected to remain in the office, and the
same goes for a 6 a.m. call with Europe or a 7 p.m. call with Asia.

"We need to make sure you have high-speed broadband access at home, so we
do provide it to every employee," Nagel said.

Given the relatively low numbers of young women pursuing careers in the
STEM disciplines - even with historically high numbers of women in the
collegiate ranks - recruiting from colleges is still a challenge for Cisco
and other technology companies. Cisco, which has established a women's
action network to support women as they enter the workforce, may have a
special advantage in recruiting women to IT because it has a female CIO,
Rebecca Jacoby, which in itself conveys sensitivity to the issue of
diversity. It also lends credibility to Cisco's Networking Academy and
mentoring and intern programs.

"She [Jacoby] is extremely sensitive to the issue and she's a great
spokesperson," Nagel said. "When you see that the CIO, which is the top
technology person, is a woman, you know that there are growth opportunities
for you."

Cisco believes that diversifying its workforce in terms of gender, race,
and other factors contribute to its business goals. "We believe that
employees from different backgrounds bring different thinking and
innovation with them to Cisco," she said.

Youth is served

Guri Sohi, chairman of the Computer Science Department at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, has talked candidly about the declining numbers of his
department since the height of the dotcom era in 2000. At that point, the
UW Computer Science Department granted about 170 bachelor's degrees
annually, and now is down below 80 per year. It also once granted 100
master's degrees annually, but that has declined to about 50 per year.

Meanwhile, PhDs have remained stable at roughly 20 per year, but there are
some ominous national trends. Roughly 75 percent of all doctorate degrees
granted nationally in electrical engineering are going to non-U.S.
citizens.

UW-Madison's experience mirrors the national trends, and several efforts
are underway to reverse it. One Wisconsin effort is Powered Up, a
consortium of businesses and schools in Dane County working to increase
awareness in information technology careers. The group was formed in 1999,
and is now engaged in talks with the Information Technology Association of
Wisconsin to expand statewide.

Internships, job shadowing, and links to organizations participating in
programs like UW-Madison's Information Technology Academy are among the
ways Powered Up is trying to reach its target audience. The message is
simple: don't buy into the geeky image that has been hung on young techies.
That starts with pointing out that, according to the state Department of
Workforce Development, that Wisconsin IT-related jobs with the most job
openings between 2004 and 2014 are not programming occupations, but jobs
like computer application software engineers, computer systems analysts,
and network and computer support administrators.

Teresa Drabenstadt, senior manager of internal audit and IT for CUNA Mutual
Group and a spokesperson for Powered Up, said students often have a
misguided perception of IT and are unaware of the amount of variety
involved in the technology industry.

"Everybody thinks of the geek in the corner, programming and not talking to
anybody, and being very introverted, uncool and all that," Drabenstadt
said. "We're trying to change that perception."


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