Technicians, Technologists, Analysts: St. Louis Plans for a Great IT Workforce
FutureWork
Mid-year 2007, private and public sector interests in the St. Louis area came together to find new ways to strengthen the collective ability to attract and engage the high-quality talent pool in order to excel in the 21st Century global economy.
The founding partners of Greater St. Louis Works were the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association; WorkforceStLouis2.0; the IT Coalition of Innovate St. Louis; the Missouri Department of Economic Development’s Division of Workforce Development; the Workforce Investment Boards of the City of St. Louis, St. Louis County, and St. Charles County; and other state and local partners.
This scan focuses on the study’s findings regarding the IT and higher education.
Challenges in Education
Businesses, educators, and students presented perspectives regarding the competencies of new entrants to the IT workforce, and three of the major themes they brought to our attention follow.
First, the currency of the talent marketplace has changed, and while college degrees are important - increasingly important, in fact, for long-term career development - they are not necessarily the total ticket to good entry-level jobs.
Employers are looking for candidates with the demonstrated ability to apply technology in the business setting. Reflecting this, representatives of St. Louis area corporations with large IT workforces indicate that they fill most of their entry-level hiring needs through two sources: internships and staffing firms.
Demonstrated ability also includes mastery of specific software applications, which is most-often evidenced by certifications (“certs,” in the jargon of IT professionals) earned through short-term training programs, accessible locally or on-line.
College graduates who are not certified or who cannot otherwise demonstrate the ability to apply technical skills may receive further training from their new employers (which some business representatives indicated to us that they expect to do) or they may be passed over until their resumes demonstrate some level of practical business experience.
Experienced IT professionals emphasized the point that two- and four-year college degrees do provide the essential foundation that individuals need to advance in technology careers.
BA and AA degrees may not be as important at the entry level, where college graduates and self-educated tech savants (those incredibly smart “geeks” with the aptitude and appetite to acquire technology skills on their own) can sometimes compete on a level playing field. But college graduates advance ahead of the very best non-degreed people when high-performing IT employees are being considered for management or strategic business development positions.
At this point, the college degree evidences a breadth and depth of knowledge that differentiates one technically proficient candidate from another.
Secondly, within dynamic organizations, IT is increasingly being integrated across all business lines as a strategic core competency. Companies need talented people who can understand and support that integration.
This puts additional strains on the educational system, which has been slow to respond to the need to effectively link technical and non-technical disciplines at the academic level. Some students of computer science, IT, and engineering programs brought this up in our outreach dialogues when they expressed a desire for courses of study to learn technical skills in the context of other areas.
Students named very specialized areas such as IT and the arts, IT and communications, IT and entrepreneurship - all of which are emerging fields. The finer the academic pie is sliced, however, the closer the situation resembles what one academic leader described as “too few students wanting too many things.”
Some colleges, universities, and technology service firms are beginning to develop curricula that do integrate IT in other disciplines, however, focusing on business, finance, social sciences, health systems administration, and other areas. And there is a trend toward short-term non-credit courses that bring together working professionals from different departments within the same company to integrate knowledge and strategy to achieve specific goals.
The business services arm of one local university, for example, offers a course in information security for organizational teams comprised of IT, legal, and management staff.
Nonetheless, these are exceptions rather than common practice, and integration of IT with other disciplines is a major challenge for academic institutions charged with preparation of the workforce of the future.
Notes from a meeting of technology and computer science educators around the region indicate that “the failure to effectively integrate IT education into the professions - such as business, accounting, human resources, criminal justice, and medicine-as well as the integration of soft skills, written and oral communication, group dynamics, critical thinking, problem solving, intercultural education into IT programs is a critical current weakness. Students in other fields may select IT minors, but integration into their profession is left to the student.”
Thirdly, information technology has dramatically increased the speed, flexibility, and precision with which work can be done - and these have become the qualities that businesses and students expect to see in technology education, as well.
Most two- and four-year colleges and universities have established industry advisory councils comprised of business people who meet with academic faculty on a periodic basis to consider ways to bring talent supply and demand into better alignment. These councils have achieved some level of success, but frustrations about effective communication between business and education persist on both sides.
This study (January 2008) and a companion study on labor market information (March 2008) are available at:
http://www.greaterstlouisworks.org/
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The Minnesota Future Work program is operated by Daniel Wagner Wagne054@tc.umn.edu and Victor Ward vwwardmfw@comcast.net . To add names of people to receive Future Work Scans or to notify us of a change in your e-mail address, please send an e-mail to Bruce.Steuernagel@so.mnscu.edu who manages the program.
Minnesota Future Work is funded by the Carl D. Perkins Act, Office of the Chancellor, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities.
