June 30, 1999

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IT Skills Gap Demands Action

By Jennifer Mateyaschuk

Related links:

Labor Intensive The Age Factor Interview: Secretary of Commerce, William Daley sidebar: Goverment Recommendations U.S. Department Of Commerce's Descriptions of IT Worker Job Categories Go For IT! The U.S. Dept. of Commerce's public resource website for IT hiring and training.

he Department of Commerce has one word for IT managers stung by the shortage of skilled workers: training.

In a report released today called "The Digital Work Force: Building InfoTech Skills at the Speed of Innovation," Commerce Department executives see training, retraining, and collaborative education initiatives between the private and public sectors as critical to satisfying the growing demand for technology expertise.

"There's no question that if you don't have people properly trained for the future, it will affect our economy," Secretary of Commerce William Daley said in an interview with InformationWeek last week. "If the need for IT workers isn't addressed, it could have a sizable impact on our economy because information technology, such as E-commerce, is playing such a tremendous part in our economic explosion," Daley says. (For full text of interview, go to http://www.informationweek.com/741/daley.htm)

Commerce is careful to avoid the word "shortage" in connection with the growing demand for IT talent. The report points out that the computer industry tends to see the problem as a worker shortage, but employee advocacy groups argue there are enough trained technical professionals in the United States, but industry professionals aren't tapping these resources. Economists, on the other hand, contend the IT workforce challenge is the expected result of a rising importance of IT in our economy, and market forces will fix the problem in the long run.

Employment Projections For Core IT Occupations
Demand for computer scientists, computer engineers, and systems analysts are each projected to more than double in the decade ending 2006. By comparison, the growth rate for all occupations is expected to increase 14% during this period.
Occupation	employed 1996	projected 2006	projected growth
Computer scientists	212,000	461,000
Computer engineers	216,000	451,000
Systems analysts	506,000	1,025,000
Computer programmers	568,000	697,000
Total	1,502,000	2,634,000
All occupations
Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1996 Industry-Occupation Employment Matrix

The Commerce Department's Office of Technology Policy has concluded that the problem is more complex than any one of these views taken individually. The challenge reflects the pervasiveness and fast-paced growth of IT within our economy. The solution, therefore, isn't just to get more people involved in IT but to properly train them in the ever-changing nuances of technological innovation.

The Commerce report points out that IT was responsible for more than a third of the growth in the U.S. economy between 1995 and 1997, and IT accounts for almost half of the nation's long-term growth since World War II.

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