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Professor Andrea Houston and Professor Suzanne Pawlowski: IT Professional Workforce Pipeline Research. Despite the recent downturn in the IT sector and the layoffs and dramatic decrease in demand for IT professionals (especially those without experience), the United States is still anticipating a shortage in IT professionals over the next 10 years. Since the federal government considers that having a well-trained technical workforce gives the United States a desirable competitive economic advantage, considerable effort in the form of federally funded studies and reports and federal funding has been authorized in an attempt to address and rectify this problem. Most of this effort has been focused on IT recruitment and attracting underrepresented groups into the IT Workforce pipeline through traditional and non-traditional pathways. As part of this research effort, the NSF has funded project entitled "ITW: Attracting Women into the Information Technology Workforce through Technology Immersion." It is funded through the CISE Directorate and is a Research Infrastructure Grant (#0090000) for $352,738 effective 03/15/01 through 03/15/04. This project is a joint research project between LSU and Saint Joseph’s Academy (a private all girl’s Catholic High School in Baton Rouge) that looks at attitudes towards technology, technology adoption, technology use and technology careers in high school girls as a result of a unique technology immersion program. We are analyzing 5 years of survey data that looks at technology in general (and laptop use specifically) and have conducted an intensive six month study on the use of one particular software application both in a madatory setting and its creative and voluntary use in other settings. Results of this research have been published in academic journals, presented at academic conferences and at NSF conferences.
There is however another side to the IT Workforce pipeline, which involves IT retention problems or leakage from the IT Workforce pipeline. Since employers can spend up to the equivalent of between 10% and 100% of an annual salary on recruitment, an equally large amount on training in the first 2 years and lose a large amount of money in lost productivity while a new employee is getting up to speed, rapid IT turnover can result in a significant expenditure of money without an immediate payback for an organization. The loss of an employee who has several years of experience with an employer can also be expensive due to the loss of corporate memory and corporate knowledge about the information systems, projects and user groups or clients that individual has been involved with. These problems are even more severe for State and Local governments and their agencies as they can rarely compete with private industry in terms of salary and other benefits. During poor economic times, IT professionals may be willing to work for the public sector. However, it is typical for these organizations to lose their IT professional talent to private industry during economic booms. We were fortunate to establish a relationship with the CISD organization that consists of the IT Directors of all the Louisiana State agencies, including all state universities and colleges. They meet on a monthly basis and are a very active organization. Through association with them, contacts with the state CIO and the director of economic development for the IT sector in the State of Louisiana have been established. The belief is that these relationships will be extremely fruitful for research in this area. Professor Houston and Pawlowski have already conducted one study on retention and employee satisfaction for IT professionals who work for Louisiana State Agencies. Currently, analysis is proceeding of the resulting excellent data set, which contains both quantitative and qualitative data. Research has been presented at one conference and one academic paper has been published.
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