Information Technology Worker Shortage Conference

The issue first began to attract political attention early last year with a publicized report from the ITAA, Help Wanted: The IT Workforce Gap at the Dawn of a New Century. The report, based on a telephone survey of job vacancies at mid- and large-size employers, asserted a current gap of 190,000 unfilled jobs with projections of more than one million new jobs created in the industry by the year 2004 (see "IT Companies Heavily Courting CS Grads," CRN, May 1997).

Although the ITAA report received some criticism of its methodology and use of data, the testimonials of senior industry executives together with corroborative data on job growth from the Bureau of Labor Statistics lent credence to the overall message. In some ways, looking at the extraordinarily rapid growth in the technology, the surprise would be if there were no shortage!

But, even accepting that premise leaves a lot of unanswered questions (and, as will be seen below, not all agree with it). The Commerce Department’s Office of Technology Policy (OTP) decided to take a closer look and issued its own report last fall. OTP’s conclusion is apparent in the report’s title, America’s New Deficit: The Shortage of Information Technology Workers.

OTP narrowed the definition of IT workers (somewhat ambiguous in the ITAA report) to four "core" information technology professions: computer scientists, computer engineers, systems analysts, and computer programmers. Clearly, some might object to that narrowing, given the growing role of content and information specialists in the creation of systems.

The advantage is that the definition fits current labor projection definitions and models, but these days, a development team creating a new education CD-ROM, for example, might consist of only one or two programmers teamed with content experts, graphic designers, media specialists, and learning specialists. All would be needed to produce an effective and marketable product, all might need to have more than passing knowledge of information technology, not all would qualify as "core" IT workers. But, the policy analyst’s sensible approach is usually to start where you have data and go from there.

OTP also concluded that we were facing a shortage, interestingly, not only based on the continued growth of information technology as an economic sector, but on the growth in what they referred to as "information intensity" across the economy – that is, the proportion of information workers employed in other "user" sectors (a proportion that is particularly growing is the service sector.) This tells us not only where the demand is coming from, but gives some clues about the skills new workers will need. It also says that the problem is not just one for the information industry, but that the pain of any severe IT worker shortage would be felt throughout the economic structure.

The OTP report set the stage for the January conference. The conference, seemingly intended to attract and display high-level interest in the shortage issue, consisted of four major program elements:

1. Presentations by administration officials and senior corporate executives about the dimensions and importance of the problem.

2. Problem-solving workshops and presentations to exchange information about successful programs for retraining and recruiting workers.

3. A preliminary report of a colloborative study by the ITAA and a team of researchers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI). Like the original ITAA study, this one also focused on vacancies, but looked at a broader range of firms from user sectors as well as from the IT industry. This study raised the ante substantially, claiming a current shortage of 346,000 (129,000 in the IT industry and 217,000 in non-IT firms).

4. A panel that presented a surprisingly wide range of views on the issue, including some quite critical of the ITAA and Commerce Department reports.

The political and policy problem revolves around the concept of "shortage," which turns out to be a trickier question than most of us might think. A shortage of a commodity, i.e., gasoline, food, water, heating oil, and the like, would seem to be pretty apparent to the average person. People would go hungry, freeze, stand in lines, and so on. Of course, the signs of a worker shortage may be more subtle, but even more important. The concept of shortage, itself, turns out to be rather fragile in a market economy. What happens when supply falls short of demand? Prices go up. But, does a price increase automatically imply a shortage? And isn’t a price increase simply a signal to the market to produce more – just what we want to happen?

One problem, of course, is that labor markets are not like most commodity markets. One can’t simply plant a larger crop of computer scientists and deliver when prices are high and store the excess in silos when prices fall. Delay times are very long, and signals imperfect, particularly when one talks about affecting the future career choices of youngsters. Even if market signals did get through clearly, the response time is in the scale of years. Much of the IT industry thinks in a time frame of months, even weeks. And if they cannot hire the people they need to move a project forward, they will simply choose another direction.

All of this means that the industry could very well perceive a serious problem while economists and statisticians express skepticism. "What is the metric?"

One can poke holes in counting reported vacancies, for example, as a surrogate for labor shortage. Many of the panelists listed such problems in criticizing the VPI study. Another measure might be salary inflation, but that is not always easy to document nationally either, since it gets caught up in issues of quality as well as quantity.

Worse, it raises a tough, perhaps the toughest, political problem. Since price is a measure of a commodity shortage, it is important to recall that, when prices move up or down, there are winners and losers. Certainly, if wages for computer scientists and engineers are escalating, why should they complain? In fact, many might think it’s a pretty good deal! Add to that a skepticism – one might call it cynicism, particularly on the part of some in the traditional engineering community and labor unions – of the motives and practices of employers, and one has the seeds of an opposing view. And, if the powerful labor unions get interested, it could make for some real difficulties.

Put most starkly, one speaker at the meeting accused the information industry of fabricating the whole shortage. Why? To create pressure for relaxing immigration laws and to encourage more workers to enter the profession. This, in the view of the speaker, would drive wages down in two ways: by increasing competition for vacancies and by allowing firms to lay off more expensive, older information workers.

Pretty strong stuff, but a politically powerful argument, not just because the labor unions could pick it up, but because, as shown in the UPS strike, the public at large has some uneasiness and sympathy for workers caught up in the consequences of technological change.

That sort of counterforce is less likely to remove the issue from the agenda; given the obvious importance of the information economy to the nation, the political system is likely to be very reluctant to simply dismiss an issue so strongly championed by the industry. Rather, it will force the search for policies to concentrate initiatives that are clearly focused on the workers, i.e., job protection, mid-career job retraining, and the like. One administration official at the meeting, for example, said that there was not support in the administration for relaxing immigration rules, a move that labor unions and some engineering groups would strongly oppose.

Let’s assume that, although metrics are fuzzy, we actually face a serious shortage of IT workers. Where do computer science and computer engineering departments fit in this debate? It’s not yet completely clear.

Obviously, the graduate and undergraduate level CS&E majors will fill only a necessarily very small, but also a critically important, portion of the job vacancies, especially assuming the "true" shortage is anything like the numbers reported at the meeting. Possibly more demanding on the departments could be the growing need for minors and service courses across the campus. Some departments may find themselves playing an important role in job retraining programs. And, since one answer to a worker shortage problem is more productive engineering and analytical tools, there may well be implications for research.

To date, the computer science and engineering community has not participated very actively in the debate, although CRA provided substantial input to the OTP study and had representation at the Berkeley meeting. What may be necessary now is for the departments to begin discussing, for both the short term and long term, the following question: how will the projected changes in the information economy and work force needs affect the roles of computer science and computer engineering within their own institutions and within the communities they serve—be they local, regional, or national?