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Tech jobs have room to grow
here and abroad, experts say
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Gina Vermiglio, a mechanical engineering student at the Illinois
Institute of Technology in Chicago, isn’t anxious about
finding a job when she graduates in two years. Her circle of
friends, including a boyfriend who graduates in December,
isn’t worried either.
Vermiglio’s brainy crowd may not be fretting about U.S.
engineering jobs moving to India and China, but everyone else seems
to be.
The angst about the loss of high-tech, white-collar jobs is busting
out all over, from the covers of Time and BusinessWeek magazines to
the stump speeches of presidential candidate John Kerry. The Sturm
und Drang is palpable on techie Web sites such as
YourJobIsGoingToIndia.com.
Yet a growing number of experts are speaking up to argue that the
“offshoring” crisis is seriously overblown,
particularly when it comes to information technology jobs.
“Despite all this hysteria, we still grew IT jobs by 10
percent last year. Do you think you’re any less reliant on
technology today than you were four years ago?” asks John
McCarthy, a researcher with Forrester Research, a technology
research and consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.
Sure, some high-tech and engineering jobs are going to Asia. Some
290,000 IT jobs have moved offshore since 1999, Forrester
estimates. Many of them are relatively low-level positions such as
code writers or program debuggers, say those who track job
shifts.
But the hand-wringers are overlooking an even bigger phenomenon: An
ongoing shortage of high-tech workers in this country that has been
only partially allayed by importing foreign tech workers.
The shortfall will only get bigger, economic experts say, as robots
take over more factories and new doctors perform minimally invasive
surgery using computers and miniature cameras. Even our houses are
going high-tech with fancy sound systems and nanny cams to monitor
the hired help.
“We have been avoiding the need for more technically trained
people for the last 10 years,” said McCarthy.
“We’re paying the piper.”
McCarthy acknowledges he played a role in generating fears about
job flight.
In late 2002, he authored a widely quoted Forrester study
predicting that 3.3 million more U.S. service industry jobs and
$136 billion in wages will move offshore to countries such as
India, Russia, China and the Philippines over the next 15
years.
Sounds like a lot in aggregate, but that breaks down to 220,000
jobs a year, McCarthy notes, a drop in the bucket given the U.S.
economy’s 130 million jobs. The domestic economy can create
220,000 jobs in a single month without breaking a sweat, economists
point out, although it hasn’t happened lately – much to
President Bush’s chagrin.
Of course, that doesn’t lessen the pain of a displaced
white-collar worker who went into technology thinking it was
secure. But McCarthy believes another force is at work.
The current anger about offshoring may reflect a more general
disappointment that tech salaries have leveled off and stock
options are no longer being handed out freely.
“IT is taking on a lot of the attributes of a mature
industry,” McCarthy said. “Wages aren’t
increasing at the rate they were. The IT worker has gone from 60 to
zero.”
Dennis Roberson, the former chief technology officer at Motorola
Inc., has another explanation, and it has more to do with
what’s happening in Washington than Bangalore, India’s
high-tech capital.
“Right now, it’s politically fashionable to fan the
flames, and we do have a high unemployment rate,” said
Roberson, who became vice provost of new initiatives at IIT after
leaving Motorola.
But if Democratic politicians were paying closer attention to
demographics, they might be less worried about offshore jobs and
more concerned about a looming labor shortage at home.
“Baby Boomers are leaving the work force at an alarming rate
in engineering disciplines,” Roberson warned. “Within
three to five years, we will have a terrible problem in the reverse
direction. We won’t have enough people to satisfy the demand
for tech jobs in the U.S.”
No wonder IIT students aren’t worried. During the last three
years, the job placement rate for IIT engineering graduates was 96
percent.
Still, there’s rising concern that the offshoring talk is
scaring away students from technology and computer sciences.
DeVry University, the for-profit school focused on technology
degrees, is fine-tuning its curriculum after seeing undergraduate
enrollment decline a little more than 10 percent from 48,000 in
fall 2001 to 43,100 last fall.
“We’re de-emphasizing programming, something more
likely to be outsourced,” said Jonelle Niffenegger, DeVry
spokeswoman.
“We’re emphasizing systems analysis, which is looking
at the business problem you’re trying to solve through a
particular application. You have to be on-site to analyze the
problem and talk with people,” she said.
The new program was enough to keep Vermiglio from transferring to
an art school when she became bored with classes like Calculus
3.
By signing on, she will be able to take classes in design at
IIT’s Institute of Design, a downtown program that before was
only open to graduate students.
“It just seemed perfect for what I wanted to do,” she
said.
usan Chandler
Chicago Tribune
(KRT)
