CRA National Study of IT Worker Shortage

Many of CRA's members are reporting anecdotal data that suggests there is a significant shortage of information technology workers in the United States. Academic departments are experiencing tremendous increases in the number of recruiters on campus to hire their graduates, as well as increases in graduate students and faculty members being attracted away to industrial posts. And yet our industrial members are reporting their difficulties in filling positions. To investigate this growing concern and suggest national solutions, CRA is undertaking a study of the alleged shortage of Information Technology (IT) workers in the United States. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding the effort.

The national policy debate over the IT worker shortage has an interesting history. Over the past two years, a trade association, Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), produced two reports arguing that there is a serious shortage of information workers in the United States. The first study is Help Wanted: The IT Workforce Gap At The Dawn Of A New Century, Feb. 1997, Stuart Anderson, ITAA. The second study is Help Wanted 1998: A Call for Collaborative Action for the New Millennium, Feb. 1998, ITAA and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). Concern that the United States might have a deficit of hundreds of thousands of IT workers, coupled with an apparent worsening of the problem, captured the attention of the U.S. Department of Commerce. It too released its own report with findings similiar to the first ITAA report. The Commerce report was roundly criticized by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), which faulted the statistical methods used in gathering the data put forward by ITAA and the Commerce Department, and questioned the basic shortage reported by both.

Proposed legislation in the U.S. Congress to raise the cap on the number of H-1B visas given out each year has attracted national policy attention to the worker shortage issue. H-1B visas are a kind of temporary visa used by a number of high-tech companies, among others, to employ foreign workers. The largest numbers of H-1B workers, by far, come from India. The ITAA and most of the computer industry have lined up in favor of increasing the cap, while the labor unions and others have lobbied against the increase. This issue, for example, has pitted members of the IEEE Computer Society, many of whom work in industry and can see the signs of the shortage, against the IEEE USA organization (the lobbying arm for the IEEE in Washington), which is trying to protect jobs for U.S. electrical engineers.

CRA has been concerned about the misunderstandings that have been expressed by some of the participants in this H-1B debate and repeated in the national press. One particularly common misunderstanding was that the worker deficit could be overcome if only the universities would produce the requisite number of computer science and engineering graduates. It is clear that this reasoning is faulty on at least two grounds. First, the ITAA and Department of Commerce reports give a broad definition of IT workers, which includes virtually anyone who works in an IT organization; but degree recipients in computer science and engineering are not typically the people who hold many of these jobs, such as help desk support or web designer. Second, these organizations are speaking of current deficits that already number 200,000 and are growing, while the annual national production of bachelor's degrees in computer science and engineering is only about 25,000; thus there is no chance that these graduates could fill all of the positions.

CRA approached the NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), suggesting that it support a study of the IT worker shortage, with a particular emphasis on the supply issues. The study would be conducted in partnership with CRA's affiliated computer professional societies: AAAI, ACM, IEEE Computer Society, SIAM, and USENIX. NSF agreed to support the study, provided that it is "objective and scientific." To achieve these goals, the study has been designed to involve a broad spectrum of people from both academia and industry to serve on the study group and to review preliminary drafts, and to take a new and unbiased look at all the relevant data that can be collected from various public and private sources. Under the direction of CRA Board Member Peter Freeman and CRA Executive Director William Aspray, the study group began its work in May 1998. There is an ambitious schedule to produce a final report no later than March 1999, so that the findings can be considered in the national policy debate in the first congressional session of the new year.

One of the first things that the steering committee (composed of representatives from our affiliate societies, plus several others —a complete list of the study group is on page 9) did was meet with government employees who have been concerned about the IT worker issue in order to find out what kinds of information and recommendations would be most helpful to them. Discussions with representatives of NSF, the GAO, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and Congressional committees on science and technology issues suggested that the study group should focus on a reevaluation of existing data, new categorizations of information workers to be used in future data-gathering, and seed-corn issues in selected areas of computing such as data mining and networking, among others.

The steering committee met several times to figure out what value it could add to the debate. In order to collect and interpret the data surrounding this issue, the steering group contracted with the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology to procure data, and with a labor economist familiar with the IT labor market to assist with the interpretation. The study group was broadened to include people familiar with various aspects of the issue: formal education of various kinds from community college through graduate school, continuing and alternative education, underrepresented groups in computing, past IT worker shortages, previous seed-corn issues and national responses to them, industrial recruiting and job skill issues, and relevant labor issues.

After several meetings to discuss strategies and approaches, the study group was divided into three subcommittees to analysis and draft preliminary recommendations. Stuart Zweben and Steve Johnson are, respectively, leading groups studying the supply and demand issues; while Paul Davis is heading a group that is examining contextual issues such as the international marketplace, underrepresented groups, seed-corn issues, and other exogenous factors. The three subcommittees will report back to the full study group in mid-November to hash out recommendations. By the end of the year the two principal investigators will write a first draft of the report, which will go out for extensive review in early 1999.

It is too early to report any findings at this time. Look for results of the study in the March or May 1999 issues of CRN and on the CRA webpages http://www.cra.org.