Help Wanted
The Internet is booming, yet, a shortage of skilled workers has become a serious chokepoint holding back progress at many American technology companies.
The Internet is booming, and now that software is running everything from mainframe computers to wireless phones, job opportunities are exploding in the computer science and engineering professions. Yet, a shortage of skilled workers has become a serious chokepoint holding back progress at many American technology companies.
Estimates put the number of information technology jobs going unfilled in the United States at more than 350,000, and rising fast. The Department of Labor projects that the demand for computer systems’ analysts, engineers, and scientists will double in less than a decade, from 1.5 million to more than 3 million.
Finding people with the right skills is the single biggest challenge facing every company in our industry. Microsoft employs more than 200 full-time recruiters just to seek out talented engineers for our product and research groups. Yet, more than 3,500 of our technical positions remain unfilled.
Recruiting this talent is crucial to our success and the success of other high-tech businesses. More training and educational opportunities in technology fields will help solve America’s information technology labor shortage, and Microsoft, along with other industry leaders, is working to ensure that the resources are available to make this happen.
Over the past three years, Microsoft has contributed more than $570 million in financial, product, and training support to help America develop more skilled workers. This includes our recent contribution of $344 million in software to support Intel’s Teach to the Future program,; Aa worldwide effort to train more than 400,000 classroom teachers how to use technology to enhance learning; and $75 million to the United Negro College Fund to improve computer access and training for students and faculty members at historically black colleges and universities nationwide.
Now, however, America’s high-tech industry must maintain its global technological leadership by ensuring that companies can hire qualified information technology workers. people for specialty occupations.Sometimes that means hiring foreign-born graduates of U.S. engineering programs and foreign professionals with unique skills in software development, or in adapting products to suit the more than 30 foreignlanguages and 100 different countries in which we do business.
Considering that more than 50 percent of Microsoft’s nearly $20 billion in revenues last fiscal year came from export sales, foreign employees make invaluable contributions to our global success, and their earnings percolate through the U.S. economy, multiplying jobs for Americans. The situation is similar at literally hundreds of other American technology companies, which also hire foreign workers with essential skills.
Unless Congress acts soon, however, America’s acute shortage of IT workers will take a dramatic turn for the worse. Last month, the Immigration and Naturalization Service closed the door on new applicants for visas that allow foreign professionals to work in the United States for a limited period of time. The number of applicants for these H-1B visas has already reached the yearly limit permitted by law, and the current law calls for a nearly 50 percent cutback from the existing level between now and 2002.
This is not good news for America’s high-tech economy, which continues to grow, but only as fast as it can employ appropriately skilled people, its primary resource.
The high-technology industry is broadly united behind the need for Congress to raise the limit on the number of H-1B visas. Along with other leading high-tech companies, Microsoft supports bipartisan legislation sponsored by Senators Hatch, Abraham, and Feinstein, and by Representatives Dreier, Lofgren and Adam Smith. Their proposals would significantly raise the limit on the number of foreign professionals that can be hired over the next three years.
This is vital to sustaining our nation’s global leadership in the high-technology arena, and our industry’s continued economic health and contribution to the United States economy.
Recently, other nations, including Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia have taken steps to open their doors wider to skilled foreign workers. If America fails to act to increase the number of H-1B visas for foreign professionals, and on needed improvements in education, we risk unilaterally disarming ourselves in the global competition for brainpower.
