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Home-schooling IT talent

Memphis has long served as home base to technology innovator and shipping giant FedEx Corp. This fall, the city hopes to become a hotbed of leading-edge technology research and learning, when the four-story, $23 million FedEx Technology Institute opens at the University of Memphis.

By Mary Brandel- Computerworld

The vision is for the center, which was pioneered and partially funded by FedEx, to become "the digital epicenter of the Mid-South," says Jim Phillips, chairman and executive director of the institute. On-campus students, professors and scientists, as well as researchers and business executives inside and outside of FedEx, will gain access to "mind-blowing technologies with unbelievable applications in an infinite number of areas," he says.

A very distinct benefit for FedEx is that the institute will increase and sharpen the skills of the local IT talent pool, and it will produce graduates right in Memphis who have training and experience that jibe with FedEx’s needs. But Phillips is quick to point out that the new center isn’t just an adjunct FedEx training facility, nor does FedEx control its research efforts.

However, he says, the institute will absolutely attract more students interested in IT to the University of Memphis, which will help FedEx and other companies fulfill their IT needs. The hope is that the training might even attract new business to Memphis. "Absolutely, I can see some really interesting and relevant centers of technology inside the FedEx Institute that relate to FedEx missions," Phillips says.

At the institute’s Center for Next Generation Transportation, for instance, "we’re working to create an invisible plasma on the wing surfaces of airplanes to drive fuel costs down by as much as half," Phillips says. "And in trucking, we’re working on a unit that plugs into the truck cab that will help save billions on diesel fuel."

Beneficial Partnerships

In this climate of layoffs and few new jobs, particularly at the entry level, many large employers are opting out of campus recruiting this year (see story). But a few forward-thinking companies are seeing the wisdom of working with area universities and community colleges to turn their regions into hubs for IT activity. The benefits are plentiful, these companies say: The talent, in effect, comes to you, lowering recruiting costs; you can home-grow talent in lifelong local residents, who tend to be long-term employees; and you can influence school curricula to meet your IT needs.

"The majority of companies are not doing what they need to do to develop skills proactively," says Maria Schafer, an analyst at Meta Group Inc. "When things do pick up, they’ll be scrambling to find people." She recommends that companies maintain relationships with universities or training institutes to ensure that the basic skills they need are being taught. They can then, in turn, expand upon them.

Retaining IT employees and creating a larger local talent pool were goals of Missouri’s state government in the late 1990s, says Jan Grecian, a technology specialist for the state in Jefferson City. "We employ roughly 1,400 IT professionals, and there are other businesses here in town," she says. "We were doing a lot of stealing from one another." Salaries were also a problem: People could easily move to the larger cities of St. Louis or Kansas City to double their money.

So the state, local IT employers, area universities and colleges, and the Chamber of Commerce formed a coalition and developed a mission to get more local people into the IT field. The group, which meets once a month, targeted high school students to raise their awareness of local IT education and job opportunities. The coalition also focuses on workers in other careers who want to retool for the IT field. Coalition members also joined the advisory boards of local higher education centers.

"All the schools have been good at rising to the challenge and tweaking their curriculum" to meet employers’ needs, Grecian says. For instance, in 1997, many of the schools were looking at dropping Cobol, but the coalition urged them not to because many IT shops were still heavily invested in that technology and hadn’t gone through Y2k remediation yet.

A top-notch networking degree program was added as a direct result of the coalition needing more networking talent, Grecian says, and more recently, some schools have agreed to consider adding Microsoft .Net to their curricula. Additionally, a college about an hour away installed a satellite school in Jefferson City, offering computer science, networking and Web development programs.

All of this has resulted in a greater number of qualified IT candidates. "The numbers have increased substantially in the local schools where they’ve added to the IT curriculum," Grecian says.

‘Two-Way Street’

Even big-name companies in large cities see the need to increase IT noise levels and influence the IT curricula at area schools. "The more we can do to make the IT curriculum enticing to bring others in and keep the kids who live here, the better off we are," says Don Haile, president of Fidelity Investment Systems Co., the IT arm of Fidelity Investments in Boston. "When we bring in kids from local universities, there’s a greater degree of loyalty."

Fidelity has worked with Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., on its human interface design curriculum and has served on task forces and advisory boards at the University of Massachusetts, Bentley College and MIT.

"I always get asked, ‘What should we be teaching?’ We’ll be clear that we want students to understand Java and XML and that they need to get on board with .Net," Haile says. "They know this, but we’re just confirming their suspicions. It’s a two-way street — I’m looking for new blood, and they’re interested in seeing what we think and what we’re doing."

Everyone agrees that no college program can be expected to produce students with the leading-edge skills that are immediately valuable to an employer. But, Grecian points out, if you can encourage area residents to follow the IT route at local schools that are teaching the curriculum that matters most to nearby employers, "they come out with the concepts down and a desire to learn, and they’ll do continuous training at their place of employment."

Even in the current economy, Grecian says, the coalition’s work is well worth the effort. "We haven’t been as active lately" because of the economy, she says. "But the work isn’t going away. It’s just a matter of time, and we’ll see this cycle around again."

Brandel is a freelance writer in Newton, Mass. Contact her at [email protected].

http://www.computerworld.com/careertopics/careers/story/0,10801,77823,00.html?nas=FIN-77823

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