The United States faces a growing economic challenge – a substantial and increasing shortage of individuals with the skills needed to fill the jobs the private sector is creating. The country faces the paradox of a crisis in unemployment at the same time that many companies cannot fill the jobs they have to offer. But these problems are not unrelated.
So begins a 32-page report from Microsoft they just released called, “A National Talent Strategy; Ideas For Securing U.S. Competitiveness and Economic Growth.” You can read the entire report here, and it is definitely worth reading.
The tech company says it spends more money on research and development than any other in the world, and is “opening up new jobs in the United States faster than we can fill them.”
The report cites 6,000 open Microsoft jobs right now in the U.S., an increase of 15% over last year. And over 3,400 of those jobs are for researchers, developers and engineers, a total they say has gone up 34% over the past 12 months.
“We fear jobs will start to migrate to other countries,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel and executive vice president, at a press briefing. “The skill gap is one of the biggest problems Microsoft faces.”
Microsoft says it spends 83% of its worldwide R&D budget here at home, but says that won’t continue if they can’t fill those jobs.
“There is an urgent need for workers trained in the STEM fields, yet there are not enough people with the necessary skills to meet that demand and help drive innovation.”
Even more troubling continues the report, “too few American students are achieving the levels of education required to secure jobs in innovation-based industries…the result compounds our economic problems, as many students fail to achieve their full individual potential and, as a country, we fail to achieve our full national economic potential. Every job in technology that is unfilled also means the loss of five other jobs. It is a problem that ultimately affects everyone across the country.”
So what does the company recommend to address the problem? The report breaks the solutions into two parts.
Part 1 Race To The Future: Strengthening America’s STEM Pipeline
- Goal #1 Strengthen K-12 math and science teaching and learning
- Goal #2 Broaden access to Computer Science in high school
- Goal #3 Help Americans get the degrees and credentials that Twenty-First Century jobs require
Part 2 Bridging The Gap With High-skilled Immigration Reform
- Recommendation #1 Establish a new and supplemental allocation of 20,000 H-1B STEM visas to meet employers’ hiring needs and generate up to $200 million for new investments in the American STEM pipeline
- Recommendation #2 Recapture 20,000 unused employment-based green card numbers annually to reduce the green card backlog and generate up to $300 million for new investments in the American STEM pipeline.
- Recommendation #3 Direct employers’ investments from these new. targeted immigration benefits to fund initiatives that strengthen the American STEM pipeline
The report’s summary says, “We believe we need a two-pronged approach that will couple long-term improvements in STEM education in the United States with targeted, short-term, high-skilled immigration reforms. If done correctly, the latter can help fund the former. Put together, this approach can create a more effective national talent strategy to keep jobs in the U.S,. by providing skilled employees who can fill these jobs, both now and in the future.”
What do you think? Is Microsoft on the right track here? Have they laid out a good course of action? There has been lots of talk, for a long time, about the need to increase STEM education in the U.S. What of the immigration reform piece of this? Other thoughts?
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a great and timely article David.
I do think there is a political dimension to this that you don’t mention and it is that much of America is getting taught to depend on the government and not on acquisition of the skills you mention.
Without the proper motivations, even the best policies will perform poorly.
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I agree there is a political dimension to the reasons underlying our talent shortages and skills gaps. And I didn’t address those in my article. For the purposes of this post, I was trying to stick close to the Microsoft report as my source material.
We long ago outsourced the education of America’s young people to the government, and as you point out Gregg, an unnatural and unhealthy reliance on government in many areas of our lives may also manifest itself in our struggling education system.
I recently spoke to a former government official about curing our education and technology ills, and his views about what government’s role in the reform should be may surprise you. They did me. Look for that post soon.
Hi David
Let me persist on this. Microsoft has a lot of problems and one of them is a big image problem vis-a-vis developers.
Bill Gates is out killing mosquitoes while the core desktop technologies that underpin his company rot. Meanwhile those super-talented developers Microsoft can’t find are themselves finding much better alternatives than sorting out abandoned horse shit Microsoft code.
Your article suggests that rather than recognizing its innovation problem at its core, Microsoft is busy making suggestions about how the government (#1 and #2 above) can help relieve the resulting distress.
There was a day when being a Microsoft dev meant status. Today, it’s a worse-than-LinkedIn-endorsement scarlet letter.
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I was trying to take the macro view on the issue of talent shortage, specifically tech talent shortage, and the skills gap we hear and read so much about. If Microsoft, with the largest R&D spend in the world, according to them, can be a bellwether or harbinger of the industry or human capital trends, I thought it worth taking a look at.
I am typing this on a Mac, I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about Bill Gates one way or the other, and I certainly have never worked with Microsoft code.
I will concede that in terms of products more of us might use, and product marketing and product engineering, they seem to have lost their way in many respects.
I also concede the point that their solution and their thinking apparently, doesn’t look inward, as you point out, but is externally focused. So in other words, if they have a problem finding top talent, rather than thinking “it might be us,” they are assuming there is an industry-wide shortage and that the fix needs to come from the government. Point well taken for sure.
It’s kind of like that person I met at a career fair a while back. Instead of looking at why companies are not hiring HIM, he instead goes around saying that he is a victim of age discrimination.
As for my post Gregg, I wanted to merely summarize Microsoft’s report, and leave the editorializing for the subject matter experts. Like you.
This is a trend we’ve known about since the Clinton Administration — or, if you’d prefer to be apolitical, “the 90s.” As manufacturing jobs were going overseas and the dot-com boom made our economy explode, experts were talking about how to push kids into the industry.
Me being a part of that generation of kids, having authority figures tell me I should pursue studies in engineering, computers, and Mandarin Chinese made me want to go the exact opposite direction. It’s like that guy telling Dustin Hoffman “Plastics” in “The Graduate.” It just ain’t happening. … And now kids like me look stupid for it.
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Companies like Microsoft have created their own problems by not offering training on a regular basis. Part of this training is teaching individual contributors who have moved into management roles with no training or mentoring on how to hire and interview qualified people. The second issue is that not everyone is on the internet, so if you are relying on key word and Boolean search activity and social media to fill your positions-good luck. If you want top talent, you have to go after it and pay a competitive compensation package, rather than waiting for top talent to come to you, in other words, you need to learn how to compete. We have 10,000 people a day leaving the workforce, a trend that is expected to last for 19 years. We have a population demographics problem that will continue regardless of the state of the economy. Posting and praying will not solve the problem. The size of our workforce is approximately 140 million people, with 80 million of those baby boomers. Your workforce is your older employee, not some 25 year old with no experience. By hiring individuals who meet an 8 out of 10 requirement and supplementing the skills deficiency with training, you might be able to reduce the number of open requisitions you have.
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