[ Watch on YouTube ]

Preparing workers for the 21st century information and communications technology (ICT) economy is at the heart of the Mid-Pacific ICT Center's mission. Executive Director of the Center James Jones introduced conference attendees to the Center, based at the City College of San Francisco, as well as to some of the pressing workforce-related issues that the Center was designed to address.

The 20th century, says Jones, was the century of energy, manufacturing, and transportation. Today, the economy revolves around information and innovation, both driven and enabled by ICT. 80% of California firms have said that ICT is strategically important to their organizational productivity, and most companies manage their own operations and interact with customers via ICT whatever their core competency may be. ICT also provides the means for obtaining education and training even for non-technical jobs, with the network in particular providing the very foundation, hence Jones sentiment that the term "ICT," used more widely outside the US, is far more appropriate than the US-centric term "IT," which does not call out the network itself as an important component in information and innovation.

While much of the above has been widely recognized in the new economy, many of the assumptions underlying workforce preparation are still rooted in the past, making it difficult to understand workforce needs much less how to prepare our population to fulfill those needs, and even how to judge the effectiveness of these measures.

Funded by the NSF, the MPICT Center's mission is to coordinate, improve, and promote the quality of ICT education in California, Nevada, Hawaii, and the Pacific territories, with an emphasis on 2-year colleges, as well as to advocate on behalf of ICT education to a variety of stakeholders. The Center has programs in all 112 community colleges, giving it a strong voice in ICT education given that one in four US community college students are in the California Community College system, as well as an annual Winter ICT Educator Conference held each year in San Francisco and other professional development initiatives.

As well as a presence on YouTube and Facebook, a blog and quarterly newsletters, the Center has also completed Phase 1 and Phase 2 ICT reports surveying hundreds of employers in an effort to gauge not only the importance of ICT to the economy and workforce preparation, but also to judge how well the educational system is preparing workers -- a serious challenge given the proliferation of labels for skills and classes that make it enormously difficult to judge the effectiveness of any given program. While this is frequently called a skills mismatch or a skills gap, Jones states, it is partly due to problems in labeling and a failure to recognize that ICT jobs do not only exist in Microsoft, Apple, or Google; the end result is the siloing of ICT training away from those who could profit from it due to a lack of awareness of just how broadly it is used and required. One of Jones's slides states a 99% confidence among California employer representatives with direct knowledge of ICT workforce needs that:

"California's ICT workforce labor market would work better if there were a detailed, agreed-upon, and structured framework for employer ICT workforce competency demands, which educators and trainers used to prepare the ICT workforce in consistent ways, and which employers used to communicate ICT workforce and ICT job needs."

Multiple obstacles make this a challenging issue to address, from the difficult budget environment now facing California's Community Colleges to a relatively high rate of staff turnover -- meaning that any program instituted must reintroduce itself to "all different people in the room" two years later, according to Jones.

The standard proposed by Jones to solve the "supply and demand skills mismatch" would follow that given in Fig. 1 below, and be applied as uniformly as possible in order to avoid a "tower of Babel" effect:

Figure 1: The MPICT Center's James Jones and US Dept of Labor ICT Skills Pyramid

This would also work well to smooth the transfer pathway between California's community Colleges and the California State University as well, particularly where that pathway is most rocky -- in hands-on skills, what Jones called "pulling boxes apart and plugging things in." Most such jobs, Jones stated, require a Bachelor's degree and hence a well-defined transfer pathway is critical to enabling the Community College system to play the role it must play in preparing the 21st century workforce.

About CENIC and How to Change Your Subscription:

California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state's K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC's Associate researchers and educators are engaged.

CENIC is governed by its member institutions. Representatives from these institutions also donate expertise through their participation in various committees designed to ensure that CENIC is managed effectively and efficiently, and to support the continued evolution of the network as technology advances.

For more information, visit www.cenic.org.

Subscription Information: You can subscribe and unsubscribe to CENIC Updates at http://lists.cenic.org/mailman/listinfo/cenic-announce.