It’s not the fact that the US graduates 2.5 times the number of engineers it had in the 1940’s – it’s that the rest of the private sector also needs them. This article from the Baltimore Sun illustrates the challenge Northrop Grumman faces when facing off with Sprint, Microsoft and Google for recent math, science and engineering graduates. However, you can’t somehow separate the defense sector from the rest o the private sector. Planes, instruments, and armaments are products in the global market for goods. So, in order to sweep up graduates into their programs, they have to dig deep, and get students committed to their industries early (like elementary school). But don’t be surprised if Northrop also engineers cunning programs to communicate the value of their firm to students before they graduate. The talent arms race is on…

The talent crisis is beginning to affect South Florida’s technology nexus. The old debate gets rephrased. Executives complain that universities don’t produce talent. Then when you interview the university presidents, they complain that the companies don’t hire their graduates. New CS majors and EE grads must go out of state. The university presidents are suggesting that the Florida companies expand their internship programs in order to cull students into their ranks, and mentor them up to employment. Companies in Florida who are doing this are not having retention problems. Florida struggles to build up its base of emerging industries in IT and biotech, while neighbors in NC and GA excel; the lesson for a state like FL is to communicate directly with students, and recruit them during their degree periods.

I just want to take one post to give some details on who I am.

I am a full-time instructor in Information Systems at Westwood College in Upland, California. I hold a Masters in Information Systems and Technology (MSIS) from Claremont Graduate University. My teaching speciality is in softwar eengineering, and my students participate in majors focused on the IT, ecommerce and video game industries. I have taught college students in this discipline for six years.  My own motivation for the next acropolis system stems from my experience in post-secondary education, where I have witnessed the problematic, and successful transition between education and work for students. My current work deals with building social computing systems (ie, social networks, software-as-a-service) that supports community construction around the challenges of education and employment. I currently see a problematic situation for industry in locating talent, and problems for students, who use public and private investment for education, and struggle to find employment that matches their training. I believe that the social network offers an ideal form for optimizing the connections between the demand and supply for talent.

When I see news like this, it reminds me how fundamentally important the local community colleges are. In this case, it’s Iowa’s private sector, wondering whether there will be enough skilled workers to fill positions, when more higher-paying, technical manufacturing jobs come online. Most manufacturers in the US report job gains, but in positions that require analytical problem solving in areas such as precision spot-welding, and reading schematics. This is good news, but large industry requires the education system to outfit the workforce with these high-level vocational skills.

Whenever I see large industry calling for large-scale change (Texas going nuclear, health care asking for nurses, are 2 examples), I see the local CC receiving the investment. More people look to the CC for more personal life change than it gets credit. I can’t wait to spend time spreading the next acropolis system within this ecosystem.

NYU students are expecting the buck the unemployment numbers by showing evidence of their skills. They plan to use evidence of their employable skills. By the way, I have heard that unemployment numbers are rather routine, it’s just that the rate of new job creation is currently low… Remember that some economists reject that we are in recession, and state that we are, instead, in a period of weak growth. The news continues to rattle markets, and hiring agents, nevertheless. 

My own alma mater is now rolling out an ePortfolio solution, to meet accreditation requirements. Unless you’re Harvard, you’re doing accreditation.  In the opinion of my company, the ePortfolio is pretty primitive right now, but it has a good future. The competitive drive of the employment market is making electronic portfolios important. When you start to look across the width and depth of our post-secondary system, you see why many colleges are implementing an ePortfolio component to their programs.In many ways, we’re in an era of Web 2.0 for ePortfolios, or ePortfolio 2.0. It’s when best practices proliferate, and portfolios take on greater sophistication.  

Recruiters in finance and accounting detail their hardships in finding appropriate hires. Robert Half found that slightly over half of the field of 5,000 firms they interviewed were taking up to two months to staff positions.  This is where next acropolis has to excel: at the meeting point of talent and industrial demand.   This comes amidst the estimate that in 2010, 1/2 the U.S. accounting workforce will be staffed by Generation Y, based on the numbers of individuals retiring. This will create a massive need for recruitment, and for recruitment to be accurate on talent and ‘the fit.’  

USA Today summed up a new report that states that U.S. firms need better evidence that university grads are ready to compete. They state that they need better methods to discover what a student is capable of doing, and they site that internships, senior project, and class projects are their method of choice.

To me, this news post confirms my assumption that employers want to see a student’s capability before hiring them, and that the ‘piece of paper’ approach to hiring will not work in today’s labor market place.

The enhanced ePortfolio, which I call the NextPortfolio, will do this.

The state of Texas has launched an initiative to build a professional workforce to staff and run a suite of six new nuclear plants. They expect to recruit 2000 graduates over 10 years from the A&M schools as well as community colleges. This is a great example of how the state, private industry and public education will reach out to re-tool aging industries, like the oil and gas industry, which was once the world’s leading exporter of its product.

This will create significant know-how within the Texas nuclear community, as students are steered toward this effort. It will also create the need to keep in touch with these precious young guns, as they progress through their major… These young people are betting their future on the health of the government initiative, and will need nurturing from the industry…

Recent reports show that in the three major states where nuclear plants are planned to be built, that student recruitment is in full force. Graduates entering nuclear engineering are receiving 10K signing bonuses, and 60K annual salaries for their first year out of undergrad. For this industry, the only alternative is rehiring recent retirees. And the beautiful situation emerges for these graduates, who are lured with agressive recruitment that seems to come straight to them.

For talent in this energy industry, they can expect that the hungriest employers will literally find them…

This week’s Omnibus bill will update federal spending on U.S. college students. Pell grants will catch up with the rising cost of higher education. As Harvard pledges better financial aid to middle income students, this bill will place approximately 4K worth of grants toward each applicant. This tunes federal funding for college students in line with their actual costs. A good thing, if you’re going back to school… Another trend that is apparently rising, with the expected (or real) recession of 2008, and the optimistic trend that includes the largest group of highschool graduates in history.