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 This quarter, MPICT released its Phase 3 California ICT
Environmental Scan, which is focused on input to ICT
educational programs. Download the report free at http://www.mpict.org/ict_study_phase3.html.
In the information, knowledge and innovation economies of the
21st century, all kinds of organizations and individuals
increasingly depend on computer, information and
communications technologies for productivity, efficiency,
connectivity and growth.
The U.S. still has a mostly fragmented view of the technology,
industry and occupational clusters related to these rapidly
emerging, evolving and converging fields. Much of the rest of
the world collects and analyzes data for one large, umbrella
cluster, a superset term capturing all of these inter-related
and interdependent fields: Information and Communications
Technologies (ICT).
In doing so, other countries typically see ICT technologies,
industries, and occupations higher up on their lists, and
therefore may be more likely to have implemented strategic
public and educational plans and policies to advance ICT. The
effectiveness of those efforts may be contributing to the
ongoing slide of the U.S. in various international ICT and
economic performance rankings.
ICT Workforce Demand:
 Studying industry and employment in California using the ICT
framework clearly shows that ICT is strategically
very important in California.
ICT industries include about 4% of companies, 6% of private
sector revenues, 4% of workers and 12% of private sector wages
in California, with much higher job growth and compensation
expected than for most other industries or the nation as a
whole.
ICT Workforce occupations span and are strategically important
to all industries, which leverage ICT for productivity. ICT
occupations throughout the economy, in all industries and most
organizations, employ more than a million people in California
today, include about 1 in 20 private sector jobs in the U.S.
and in California, will add more than 30,000 net new jobs in
California through more than 80,000 job postings by 2013,
which pay about twice the median wages in California.
Employers across California industries and geographies
overwhelmingly acknowledge the current and growing strategic
importance of ICT to their organizations, and there is strong
(and unmet) ICT Workforce demand - even in this difficult
economy. There are strong ICT job and career prospects for
people with advanced training and degrees and for applied
technologists without advanced degrees.
Employer ICT Workforce demand is expressed chaotically, with
employers essentially making up job titles and descriptions to
fit their needs of the moment. For example, an exploratory
query of all unduplicated online Primary ICT job postings in a
single market using information from Wanted.com showed 2,380
total job listings. Of those, there were 1,928 different job
titles. Even jobs with the same job titles had different job
descriptions and requirements. While this is understandable,
it makes it very difficult for ICT education to
comprehensively understand that workforce demand and optimally
provide ICT Workforce development efforts to meet those needs.
Employers would be well served to recognize the extraordinary
diversity of the community college mission and student
population and work with community colleges to better inform
and assist them. If we need a larger ICT Workforce with more
knowledge and skills, there is no more cost effective way of
pushing those knowledge and skills out into California
communities than the California community college system. It
costs about $100 for a California community college course. It
often costs $2,500 for a commercial training program with
similar content.
Community colleges and their ICT-related programs need to do a
better job of raising their visibility with employers and
coordinating their ICT-related program offerings and
credentials. There is significant support from California
companies for a common framework or set of standards mapping
ICT workforce needs and jobs to education and training
credentials, and for a common ICT education core.
ICT Education Workforce Supply:
 California community college ICT education offerings vary
significantly from college to college.
In the 48 California community college in the MPICT region:
Departments/Programs:
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129 different ICT related programs have 93 different names
(average 2.7 per college and range from 1 to 9),
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with little consistency in which departments those
programs reside,
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Most common - Computer Information Systems (CIS) with 13
instances
Degrees:
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303 different associate degrees with 263 unique titles
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Degrees per department ranged from 0 to 27
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Most common - A.S. in Computer Science, 9 instances
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Credits required range from 18.5 to 58.5, averaging 29.3
units, excluding General Education
Academic Certificates:
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606 certificates with 522 unique titles (most commonly
repeated - Administrative Assistant, with 7 instances)
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Certificates per college ranged from 0 to 54 and academic
units per certificate range from 12.6 to 50.9, averaging
23.9, excluding General Education
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Certificate options ranged from 2 to 15 per certificate.
Even when titles are the same, content is usually different.
These inconsistencies create confusion and frustration for
students wanting to learn ICT and probably hurt enrollments.
These inconsistencies also lead to confusion by employers, who
do not understand what a student knows and can do when they
present a community college academic credential. That devalues
community college ICT academic credentials for all.
California community colleges would be well-served to
implement a strategic solution to validating Digital Literacy,
or ICT User level competencies for all students, no matter
what academic discipline or goal, and coordinating those
solutions with public K-12 and 4-year college and university
educational systems in California. Today, everyone needs a
basic ability to work with ICT technologies and with
information, and our educational system should provide that.
 In discussions with community college educators, MPICT has
found professors frequently react negatively to the term
“academic standards,” perhaps with justification. Teachers
enjoy the freedom to create whatever ICT courses they want.
Students will attend them, because they know intuitively ICT
is important, want to develop their ICT abilities, and that’s
what’s available. However, that isn’t necessarily what best
serves society, employers, students or workers.
How does an employer know what is taught in an ICT course,
program and credential, or how to evaluate them? We need an
ICT academic system that fits together coherently. Teaching in
K-12 systems should align to teaching in community college
systems, and that should align to teaching in 4 year colleges
and universities. It very frequently does not for ICT
subjects. ICT teachers are quite comfortable with the idea of
ICT technical standards. Without technical standards,
technical systems do not work. The same is true for academic
systems. We need ICT academic standards to create a functional
and inter-operative ICT educational system. Unfortunately,
those academic standards are generally either not adequately
developed or not adequately adopted yet.
The ICT arena is confusing. We need common and plain language
ways of communicating about ICT and better
navigating the chaos of this space. This will help everyone.
The report provides several communication tools for that
purpose, as well as synthesized input to ICT educators from
hundreds of MPICT employer conversations.
Summarizing, employers generally want in their ICT workforce:
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People with a good basic education across standard
educational disciplines, including Digital Literacy or
common ICT User knowledge and skills
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People with good character and soft, employability or
workplace skills, who fit in and contribute
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People with a broad technical understanding of ICT,
ideally with a “common core” across community colleges, so
employers know that all community college ICT program
graduates have at least a defined common set of knowledge
and skills validated with an academic credential
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People with specialized technical knowledge and skills
that give them a unique value-add to technical teams,
ideally certified with standard industry certifications
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People who understand how IT operations work and who can
work in those operations
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People who understand how businesses/ organizations work
and can work with their various departments, people,
customers and suppliers
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Good citizens who understand how society works and can
manage their lives and operate in larger social contexts
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People who will add value to their business efforts, by
solving problems, institutionalizing knowledge, creating
efficiencies, making things work reliably, improving
performance, helping others work with technologies to do
what they do better, and helping management make better
management decisions.
There are plenty of opportunities for valuable additional work
to further understand and demystify the ICT space and better
develop systems to deliver the ICT Workforce we need for
ongoing prosperity and economic growth. Those include:
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ICT Workforce labor market information based on job
performance outcomes, rather than Standard Occupational
Codes, which can be mapped to academic Student Learning
Outcomes (SLOs).
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Developing a distributed ICT education capacity, to better
justify and make widely available more advanced and
specialized courses and certifications throughout the
State using distance learning technologies.
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Engaging with employers, businesses and industry more
efficiently and effectively as a 112 campus community
college system, with more opportunities for impact and
better motivations for engagement.
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Studying and reporting on efforts abroad to improve ICT
education.
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Working to update U.S. Standard Occupational Codes for
quickly changing ICT fields.
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Developing abilities to track community college student
job placements and count those outcomes, and other
outcomes in which students meet their goals, as successes
for CTE programs.
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Developing baccalaureate in ICT/IT options, so hands-on
ICT technical students have a functional transfer pathway
to jobs that screen for bachelor degrees but want hands-on
technical skills.
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Working with California K-12 systems to attract and serve
students with interests in ICT early, to develop pipelines
for digitally literate workforce members and citizens in
all fields; to develop pipelines for a competent ICT
Enabler Workforce, enabling productivity in all kinds of
enterprises; and to develop
pipelines for Computer Science, Computer Engineering,
Electrical Engineering and other advanced academic degree
pathways, so that we can continue to advance the economy
with innovation in ICT fields.
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Working to develop and spread simple and common
nomenclature and understanding of ICT, to demystify and
improve engagement with ICT.
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Improving understanding of the phenomenon by which
knowledge and skill sets migrate from R&D
Creator roles, to widely deployed but specialized ICT
technician roles, to everyday Users, as in Desktop
Publishing.
Intuitively, most people think of California, especially the
San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, as a global
leader in ICT. California policymakers, investors and
education planners should use the information in this series
of reports to develop and implement strategic plans to improve
ICT infrastructure, adoption, industries,
employment and education — to build on California’s strengths
and stay competitive in the global community.
Information and communications technologies are empowering and
enabling for all kinds of individuals and
organizations.
Implementing high quality ICT strategic and educational plans
should lead to increased economic performance and higher
employment in the state, across all industries and economic
strata. These are strategic issues that have broad
implications for California as a society, for all of its many
industries and enterprises, and for its citizens, students,
workers and families.
Back to Q3 2011
Newsletter |
