may the force be with you

11 Apr 2006

Gina Poole of IBM® talks about computer science as a major and as a career, including the role of outsourcing, mainframes, open source and open standards, and particularly the IBM Academic Initiative, of which she is director.

The IBM Academic Initiative began in 2004 as an outgrowth of the IBM Scholars Program, with a focus on enhancing the computer science curricula at universities around the world and on encouraging more students to earn degrees and enter careers in computer science. In the two years since its establishment, the IBM Academic Initiative has attracted more than 1,900 institutions, over 11,000 faculty members, and more than 440,000 students to its training programs.

What are the motivations for the Initiative? How does it work? What is outsourcing doing to the job market? Are there still career opportunities in computer science in the U.S.?

developerWorks asked Gina Poole about the purposes and directions of the Academic Initiative and what it can do for the industry as a whole. As IBM Vice President for Innovation and University Relations, Gina has worldwide responsibility for developing and executing internal programs that drive the IBM strategic imperative for innovation further into the IBM culture and external programs for collaborating with clients, partners, governments, and academia to foster innovation. She was previously Vice President of Developer Relations for IBM with worldwide responsibility for the IBM developer programs and also led the IBM Academic Initiative. Gina began her career with IBM in 1984 as a programmer in the personal computer division. She has held a number of management positions in IBM software and hardware divisions. She is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and holds degrees in computer science, business management, and economics.

You cite an alarming decline in the number of U.S. students majoring in computer science and engineering, particularly among women and minorities. What has caused this decline?

Gina: In the U.S., we've seen a decline in science and engineering degrees over the past ten years, while the number of newly declared computer science majors has actually declined by 32% over the last four years. Ever since the dot.com bust, there's been a steep drop-off. Clearly, women and under-represented minorities are leaving at alarming rates or not even considering science and engineering programs.

There are a couple of reasons: one is a myth, believed by parents, students, and high school guidance counselors, that computer science and engineering jobs are all being outsourced to China and India. This is not true. The percentage of the total number of jobs in this space is quite small -- less than 5%. According to a government study, the voluntary attrition in the U.S. has outpaced the number of outsourced jobs to emerging nations. Further, for every job outsourced from the U.S., nine new jobs are actually created in the U.S.

Do perceptions of computer science and engineering as careers tend to discourage students, especially women and minorities?

Gina: There are programs in place to encourage women and minorities to take STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) classes and to choose those careers, but they aren't moving the needle to the degree that we'd like. Why do women shy away from this field? Reason number one is the view that it is for loners and geeks, kind of like Dilbert, while women prefer more interactive, team-based positions. But there are very few jobs in the computer field where you're not working and collaborating as part of a team.

The way computer science was traditionally taught, you were assigned individual projects, you worked on them alone, and that became your view of the working world. I believe if the education better matched the real, team-based experience, where skills are applied to solving real-world problems, it would have more appeal. As an industry, we need to do more to get that message out.

Also, a lot of students don't understand the flexibility they can have. You can travel the globe; you have flexibility whether working from an office, from home, full-time, part-time. That flexibility isn't available in a lot of other careers.

You name software engineering as the fastest-growing occupation in coming years. Where is most of this growth taking place?

Gina: The growth is everywhere. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has identified computer-based jobs as one of the hottest areas, and those involving specific skill sets -- systems analysts, database administrators, computer scientists -- as some of the fastest-growing occupations through 2012, with growth rates anywhere from 40 to 70% in the U.S. alone. Further, at least 1.5 million additional IT field professionals will be needed by the end of this year.

Another factor: approximately 70 million baby-boomers will leave the workforce over the next 15 years, with only 40 million new workers coming in, and that will make the shortage of computer-skilled folks even more dramatic. Canada and EMEA foresee similar retirement rates. And even looking at India or China or Russia, where there are explosions of activity, they are trying to move as quickly as possible from agricultural to manufacturing to services economies. In developed nations in Europe and North America, about 70% of the economy is based on services and knowledge workers, and this is where India, China, and Russia would like to be.

Over 50% of students entering university in India and China select degree programs in science, technology, math, and computer science, but they still don't have enough skilled workers to meet the demand.

Some estimates place the percentage of IT jobs eligible for outsourcing at 20%. With that in mind, can you still predict significant IT job growth here at home?

Gina: Absolutely. To say, "20% of IT jobs are being outsourced" is alarming, but there are whole new fields opening up, new disciplines that will be in huge demand. Some of the more traditional IT positions -- application maintenance, transcription services, base application development -- may be outsourced for a number of reasons, principally cost and availability of workers.

But if you think of the exciting jobs marrying technology and business and really making an impact -- data mining, business intelligence, network architecture, Internet and Web architecture, Web services -- these will be the hot jobs as technology becomes more pervasive, less costly, and as more uses are found for it. There's even a view that outsourcing actually will help grow jobs.

How are "open source" and "open standards" technologies defined in the Academic Initiative?

Gina: Open source basically refers to any program whose source code is available for use or modification by users or developers as they see fit. The power of open source software is that it's developed as a public collaboration and made freely available. Linux® is the most obvious example, but there are others where IBM has been actively involved. Eclipse is a good example, where IBM donated some originally proprietary software to the open source community to build a strong framework for application development.

Open standards are publicly available specifications that provide a common method of achieving a particular goal. Open standards enable interoperability which, again, helps fuel collaborative innovation, because they make working together a lot easier. Individual companies can build value-added components on top of them. IBM is actively involved in all of the open standards communities and is building its offerings on open standards.

Will learning and adopting open source and open standards technologies enable IT and software engineers to avoid the obsolescence associated with older, proprietary technologies?

Gina: I think it will, because the collaborative model used to develop open source and open standards-based technologies ensures that these technologies will always be leading-edge and available for everyone in the developer community to see and use. If you keep up with the latest developments in open source and open standards, you'll be way ahead of those who focus narrowly on proprietary offerings, because they won't see the explosive evolution that you're seeing in open source and open standards-based offerings. Interoperability also ensures that you have a much broader set of places where you can apply your skills. Ultimately, you'll be in higher demand.

How is the penetration by open source and Linux in college and university curricula progressing?

Gina: IDC says that the overall revenue for servers, desktops, and packaged software running on Linux will probably reach about US$36 billion in the next four years, so the growth is significant. People view Linux as a great choice because the costs are lower, the reliability is better, and it scales from the smallest platforms to the biggest supercomputers, so it's applicable across a wide range of platforms.

In academia, they like to focus on the hottest technologies and what's going to be of most value to the industry. I don't think I've met with a single university that isn't using Linux in its curriculum, if not running its own infrastructure on it -- not just in the U.S. but around the world.

Would you say Linux is being adopted in higher education faster or more slowly than by industry as a whole?

Gina: Linux is being used somewhere in most of the enterprises that we talk to. It may start out in departmental solutions and work its way up to enterprise-wide solutions. There's Linux activity in just about every enterprise as well as in just about every university. IBM's entire portfolio -- all of our hardware platforms, our software -- can run Linux or run on Linux, and we're seeing really good demand and a lot of growth in that business.

Does faculty participation in the initiative require institutional cooperation and/or commitment of resources or time?

Gina: There are absolutely no strings attached to being a member of the Academic Initiative. Any faculty at any school can go to the www.IBM.com/university site, sign up as a member, and get free access to all of the resources that we have available to the program, from our software portfolio to curriculum and courseware to faculty enablement materials. All of that is available free of charge and with no strings attached.

How is the curriculum linked to teaching or use of IBM technology?

Gina: We find there's huge demand from our key customers for skills in what in the past were called mainframes -- IBM System z™ and System i™ -- the big systems. I think 98 of the Fortune 100 companies are using either System z or System i in the enterprise. At one time, universities shifted away from using and teaching big systems in their curricula, so what students learned from the academic environment was that the world must run on PCs. But when they get out into just about any medium or large enterprise, they find these large systems, and that skill set is going to be in huge demand because the baby-boomer folks who had those skills are going to be leaving the workforce.

We've stepped up our investment in academic programs for System z and System i. We're seeing more and more universities begin to include this training or even to build curricula around enterprise computing degree programs. We have some excellent partnerships with universities around the world where we're able to match students to customers the minute they graduate, so every one of those students gets snapped up.

So students can look forward to really interesting jobs?

Gina: Oh, yes. If we go back to women or anyone who wants to work on significant, perhaps change-the-world kinds of projects, some of the coolest I've seen require massive computing power, large amounts of streaming data, historical data, and real-time data, helping to make business decisions.

For example, we have a partnership in the Netherlands with a university and 15 supply chain partners in the fresh foods industry. Their concern is the 40 to 50% waste that occurs from the time fresh foods or flowers leave the farm until they reach retail outlets. If they can reduce the waste by 5%, that's significant in an industry with incredibly small margins. They're looking at different technologies -- temperature sensors and actuators, historical data, real-time data during transport -- to determine safe delivery times. A lot of the data analysis must be done in real-time, and that requires big, powerful systems.

How can IBM Business Partners participate in the Academic Initiative?

Gina: We have three-way partnerships with universities and clients to help ensure that the universities meet their needs of the clients. We're also doing a program with Texas A&M called the SSI [Shared Software Infrastructure] Hub. With some grants and investments, Texas A&M built the hardware and software infrastructure and curriculum, which they share openly with some 20 schools. While system management and maintenance are done at Texas A&M, the other schools can log in and take advantage of the environment, get their students installed, and actively build and share the curriculum.

Our initial business partner in this effort is Avnet, one of our big distributors, which joined in the initial investment to create this environment. I believe this kind of partnership is going to do a lot, particularly at schools that really can't invest in creating and maintaining their own environments. Smaller schools really appreciate being able to tap into it.

Are courses taught in a classroom or are they of the "distance learning" or e-learning variety?

Gina: They can be anything. Many universities still focus on classroom learning, but a lot of courses or pieces of them are done by distance learning. The SSI Hub is really an enabler of distance learning. A lot of universities use IBM's e-learning offerings from our Lotus® portfolio. They're also supplementing the materials with more than 500 on-demand tutorials on the developerWorks site -- short, one-hour tutorials that you can download and learn new aspects of a technology or a product. That really helps supplement the classroom learning.

Do you encourage the Academic Initiative's courses or courseware to become permanent parts of the curriculum at participating schools?

Gina: Yes, absolutely. We have courseware and curriculum materials available free from this program. Faculty can do anything they want with it - use an entire chunk or modify it to their heart's content. We provide faculty enablement training, often onsite, or we'll invite them to sessions or provide some of it in an e-learning mode.

We're also working with schools to create new curriculum. We don't view ourselves as the curriculum creation experts, so we encourage schools to work with us or with each other, because they are the experts in creating curricula that work best for the way they deliver training, and then to share it with the broader university community.

Do participating schools gain an incentive, financial or otherwise, to acquire IBM equipment, software, or other technology?

Gina: Yes. The software is free for training purposes. There are also opportunities to get significant discounts on hardware through 1% leases, loaner programs and other discount programs. We also do a lot of joint research projects, faculty awards, and Ph.D. fellowships with universities around the world. The more engaged a university becomes with us, the greater the mutual benefits.

Universities are looking to disseminate knowledge and to prepare their students to be future leaders, so they want their students to get good jobs, but they don't want to be tied to one vendor's offering. In this program, they can take advantage of all the open source and open standards-based offerings we have. They don't have to use DB2® in the classroom; they can use open source databases, and so on, but they still get value from the program, and there are no strings attached.

source:http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-nl29-directions/?ca=dgr=lnxw01GPQA