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State Struggles To Recruit Workers In Information Technology

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Unemployment may be running over eight percent in Connecticut, but employers looking for information technology skills have more openings than they can fill. Educational institutions are starting to help feed the demand, but they have a ways to go to dispel some of the myths about working in IT. WNPR’s Neena Satija has the last in our occasional series on education in the STEM skills.
 
As the economy struggles to get back on track, we constantly hear about smart, talented college graduates who just can’t find jobs. But students at one program at the University of Connecticut are saying, ‘what recession?’
 
Just listen to Walid Namane -- who still has a year to go at the University of Connecticut.
 
“I have so many options," he says. "I feel no anxiety or stress whatsoever about being placed.”
Namane is a student at UConn’s Management Information Systems, or MIS, degree program, which has seen 100 percent job placement for all of its students year after year. Dr. Ram Gopal is department head of the program.

“A lot of the challenges with IT deal with not just the technical aspects of IT, but how to fit IT within the business," Gopal explains. "And that’s what we train our students to do.”
 
Those skills come in handy at almost any business today And the companies that are looking aren’t always what you might expect. Here’s what MIS associate professor Ramesh Sankaranarayanan heard during a recruiting visit from the Interntal Revenue Service. Everyone expected IRS to be looking for, well, accountants.
 
“They told the accounting people that they want IT people," Bhattacharjee recalls. "They’ll hire all that they can find.  And the list of skills that they wanted read like our course list over here: Databases, visual basic…”
 
But despite the demand, there simply aren’t enough students entering the discipline. At UConn, MIS professors say they can supply companies with maybe one intern for every four positions they’re looking for. Executives tell the same story.
 
“We have a hard time finding people in Connecticut to do work in Connecticut for IT," says Roger Levasseur, CEO of the Tolland-based IT consulting company Open Sky, which was the the state’s fastest growing tech company in 2011.
 
"A lot of work we do, we bring in consultants from elsewhere.”
 
According to state data, computer and information scientists, database administrators, and network and data analysts will be some of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the next decade, growing as much as 42 percent. So why the lack of candidates? When it comes to IT, that’s where perceptions – or misperceptions – about the field really come in. First, says Levasseur, the layoffs in IT that resulted from the Internet bust a decade ago are still fresh in people’s minds.
 
“In the year 2000, nobody was hiring, so the young college graduates had to find jobs elsewhere," he says. "Well, ten years went by, and we don’t have any young people coming into this industry right now.”
 
There’s also a misperception about what the field really is. When people think IT, they think of solitary coding marathons. Or creating that million-dollar iPhone app. Neither are typical of what many employers are looking for.
 
“A lot of people think that IT is just sitting at a computer, and you just code all day. And that’s not it at all," says Namane. "On the contrary of what people think that everyone in IT is introverted, you really have to be an extrovert and speak with a lot of different people.”
 
Another concern for parents and students is outsourcing, the idea that IT functions can be carried out remotely from an office in India. But students and professors say that's mistaken.
 
“With MIS major, once thing I’ve learned is the MIS person has to be on site," says MIS student Imrus Sadiq. "Because they provide business solutions that you can’t outsource.”
 
In fact, multinational companies are starting to reverse the outsourcing tide,  bringing back key manufacturing plants, call centers, and other services to the U.S.  Changing these perceptions is key for UConn’s MIS program and similar programs across the country as they recruit potential majors. But another thing that needs to evolve is the communication between schools and industry, and the way we think about education.
 
“We have to ask questions about whether we’re prepared to take the time and invest the money to change the skill set of people just to run society," says Matt Nemerson, President of the Connecticut Technology Council.
 
Nemerson also says problems with workforce alignment are nothing new. Think of the manufacturing plants in the 19thcentury that used to be run on steam power, for example.
 
“They all shifted to electricity," he explains. "There were a lot of people at those plants who were maintaining the machines who suddenly needed to be electricians.”
Today those kinds of changes happen even more quickly, and it’s clear that that educators and employers are still fighting to catch up.
 
An earlier version of this story misidentified associate professors Ram Gopal, Ramesh Sankaranarayanan, and the Internal Revenue Service. The story has been corrected.

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