Prospects for Advanced Technical Careers in the USA

The Other Immigrants
March 27, 2006; Page A16

Lost in the heated debate about the future of millions of illegal laborers in the U.S. is that our system for admitting foreign-born professionals is also in tatters.

While globalization has increased the competition for international talent, U.S. businesses are frustrated by processing delays, long backlogs and especially the failure of Congress to increase the annual limits on visas for skilled immigrants. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to resume its mark-up of Arlen Specter's immigration bill today. And the good news is that it contains long-overdue provisions for hiring more of the foreign professionals who help keep our economy competitive.

Under Mr. Specter's proposal, the annual cap on H-1B guest worker visas for immigrants in specialty fields like science and engineering would rise to 115,000 from 65,000. Moreover, the new cap would not be fixed but would fluctuate automatically in response to demand for these visas. We don't think any cap is necessary. But if a Republican Congress feels it must impose one, the least it can do is let market forces have some say in the matter.

Another important reform addresses foreign students who want to work here after graduating from U.S. colleges and universities. It doesn't make a lot of sense in today's global marketplace to educate the best and brightest and then send them away to England or India or China to start businesses and develop new technologies for U.S. competitors. But that's exactly what current U.S. policy encourages by limiting the employment prospects of foreign students who would rather stay here.

Mr. Specter would let more foreign students become permanent residents by obtaining an advanced degree in math, engineering, technology or the physical sciences and then finding work in their field. It's unfortunate that the U.S. isn't producing more home-grown talent in these areas, and the fault there lies with our K-12 educators and their political backers who tolerate poor performance. The reality today is that the U.S. ranks sixth world-wide in the number of people graduating with bachelor's degrees in engineering. Jobs will leave the U.S. and our economy will suffer if bad policy limits industry's access to intellectual capital.

Anti-immigration groups and protectionists want to dismiss these market forces, arguing that U.S. employers seek foreign nationals only because they'll work for less money. But it's illegal to pay these high-skill immigrants less than the prevailing wage. And employers are required to document their adherence to the law.

According to a new study by the National Foundation for American Policy, our broken system for admitting foreign professionals also contributes to outsourcing. Since 1996 the 65,000 annual cap on H-1B visas has been reached in most years, sometimes only weeks into the new year. This leaves employers with the choice of waiting until the next fiscal year to hire workers in the U.S. or hiring people outside the country.

"Many companies concede," says the report, "that the uncertainty created by Congress' inability to provide a reliable mechanism to hire skilled professionals has encouraged placing more human resources outside the United States to avoid being subject to legislative winds." Last week computer maker Dell Inc. announced that it hopes to double its workforce in India to 20,000 within three years. There's another such announcement by some company nearly every day.

This weekend's big-city immigration demonstrations focused on the debate over the estimated 11 million illegals already in the country. But the U.S. labor market has also long been a magnet for highly skilled and educated foreigners, many of whom attend school in America at some time in their lives. In a world where these brains have more options than ever in Asia and Europe, we drive them away at our economic peril.

Report: U.S. missile science slumping

As the nation's veteran engineers and scientists retire, the military will lose much of its expertise in long-range missile technology, the report says. That means the Air Force and Navy, which operate most of the 1960s-vintage missiles, will be unable to cope with system failures or develop improved weapons, the report says.

Not only are fewer American engineers and scientists choosing to work on missile technology, there are fewer of them altogether, the report says. Each year, about 70,000 Americans receive undergraduate and graduate science and engineering degrees that are defense related, compared with a combined 200,000 in China and India, the report says.

The government should pay higher salaries and offer other incentives to attract more experts into the strategic missile field, the report says.

A task force of five outside missile experts spent two years preparing the report at the Pentagon's request.

Although the board lacks the power to force the Pentagon to act, Lt. Gen. Frank Klotz, acting head of the Air Force Space Command, told a Senate committee this month that the Pentagon is trying to improve its recruiting and retention of missile experts. Space Command runs the intercontinental ballistic missile system.

The report does not give specifics on the number of experts who are retiring or the numbers needed to replace them, but it says about 20,000 research and development scientists and engineers work in the aerospace industry as a whole, down from more than 140,000 in the mid-1980s.

John Steinbruner, head of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, says few scientists want to work on long-range missiles because "it's not too hard to figure out that American security doesn't depend on this any more."

Instead, Steinbruner says, the Pentagon's priorities have shifted toward fighting terrorism and "low-intensity conflicts," such as the insurgency in Iraq.

The report, he says, sounds like the Pentagon advisory board is "just trying to keep the money flowing" and may be biased toward Cold War-era ballistic missile systems.

The report also questions a Pentagon plan to seek more than $500 million to replace nuclear warheads on some submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. The Pentagon says those missiles could be used to strike fortified targets such as nuclear weapons facilities in rogue nations.

Converting the warheads on these missiles will be difficult, the report says, because the Pentagon lacks the necessary engineering skills. It adds that technical requirements for non-nuclear warheads are much different for long-range missiles from those for shorter-range missiles or nuclear weapons.

Employment Data Paints a Disturbing Picture

by Russell Harrison

In the first quarter of 2005, electrical engineers (EE) faced an unemployment rate that by fell to 2.1 percent, just about its historic average. The rate has been declining since 2003 when electrical engineers faced an unemployment rate of 6.3 percent — the highest ever recorded for EEs.

Good news? Not really. While a falling unemployment rate is usually a sign of an improving job market, in this case it is part of a troubling trend.

The chart below gives a more comprehensive picture of the job market for electrical engineers. The two lines show the unemployment rate (blue) and total employment (red). Between 2000 and 2003, electrical engineers faced a typical, if bad, job market: unemployment went up as total employment fell.

But in 2003, the situation changed. Between 2003 and the first quarter of this year, unemployment fell along with total employment, which declined from 363,000 in 2003 to 335,000 in March of 2005, almost 8 percent. The only way the number of unemployed engineers and the number of employed engineers can both fall at the same time is if a large number of engineers are simply leaving the profession.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the government agency responsible for gathering employment data, uses a simple survey of households to establish employment levels and rates. The agency calls a person at random, asks what they do for a living and if they have a job. A person who considers him/herself to be an electrical engineer, but who currently does not have a job, would show up as part of the unemployment rate. However, if the next month the same person is called and they have taken a job as a clerk in a local store, they would no longer be an unemployed engineer. They would be an employed sales clerk. In this case, both the engineering unemployment rate and total employment would fall — while the employment rate and total employment for sales clerks would rise.

The actual number of practicing electrical engineers continues to decline, even as the dot.com collapse fades into memory. By 2003, most of the economic effects of the boom and bust had already run their course as the bulk of the economy recovered and moved on. But the number of self-identified electrical engineers continues to decline, even as the rest of the economy recovers.

This situation is not identical across all engineering disciplines. A few fields, including software engineers and computer and information systems managers, have seen their number rise in the past year. But overall, 2004 saw 220,000 fewer employed U.S. electrical engineers than in 2000, despite falling unemployment, according to BLS data.

Declining employment can be as worrisome as increasing unemployment. The economy can still benefit from an unemployed engineer who has taken a non-engineering job. But when an engineer leaves the profession, those high-value skills may be lost for good. IEEE-USA has many career and employment products and services to aid unemployed and employed U.S. IEEE members. For an overview of the tools, products and services that IEEE-USA has to offer, go to the IEEE-USA Career Navigator Web Site

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that income inequality in the U.S. -- after 30-plus years of steadily increasing -- may be decreasing. The bad news is why that trend is reversing. It looks like another lesson in how profoundly a globalizing economy is upending what we thought we knew.

The Culture of the New Capitalism


Book Description

Today's Bosses Find Mentoring Isn't Worth The Time and Risks
March 13, 2006; Page B1

Since he became chief executive officer of Irvine, Calif.-based Freedom Communications in January, Scott Flanders has been crisscrossing the country to meet and talk with employees at dozens of locations. But Mr. Flanders has also told his managers that they can't afford to constantly offer advice and guidance to their staffs.

"In this flatter world, where most managers have a broader span of control, there aren't enough hours in the day to double-check everything employees do," he says. "We can't tolerate mediocrity, but we have to presume the competence of employees -- and then, when we're disappointed, spend time coaching and training," or weed out failures.

This new model of management -- teaching by example and offering employees intermittent feedback rather than meticulously reviewing everything they do -- is being adopted formally and informally at many companies. It's a change many managers have to make. Their staffs are larger because of restructurings that have cut layers of managers, and increasingly they are expected to produce work themselves while supervising employees' output.

Many also feel pressured to spend more time with their own bosses, reporting their progress and lobbying for resources for their staffs. And with ranks thin and chances for promotion scarce, they are wary of investing too much personal capital in a young employee for fear that person may stumble later on, tarring their own reputation with superiors.

Mr. Flanders believes that managers who spend most of their time coaching employees on how to do their jobs are wasting their talents. They would be more useful, he thinks, if they thought of ways to expand their businesses and improve productivity and work quality. In his own first job, he says, his boss, who was an engineer, "inspected everything, but that slowed the pace of where we could move. Everything we did, we did with excellence, but we also lost market share."

The emerging hands-off management model does have critics. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford Business School, cautions that "it's penny wise and pound foolish" for companies not to want managers to train and mentor employees. "Everyone has more people under them and many are playing it day by day, hoping their staffs will somehow be self-reliant," he says. "Maybe the lack of time for training won't affect performance today or next week," he adds, "but it will further down the road, when you need a new generation of leaders" or employees who can handle difficult assignments.

For most managers, it's a complicated juggling act knowing when and how much to coach employees. They don't have time for the hand-holding they may have received earlier in their careers, but they have to know who is and isn't performing well so they can jump in quickly if someone is underperforming.

"Doing this is a complicated dance, since no two employees take feedback in the same way," says Carl Bass, chief operating officer at Autodesk, the San Rafael, Calif., software maker. Some employees react well to candid criticism, saying it helps them to know what to do to improve, while others think it's a sign they're being shown the door.

Mr. Bass has learned to strategize before he meets with employees rather than blurt out criticism. He and Autodesk's human-resources chief met recently to discuss how to approach one valued employee they didn't want to lose about one aspect of his performance. They decided the employee would likely improve more quickly if he received praise for his past accomplishment along with advice about what he needed to do now.

Employees learn more from the example their boss sets than from any verbal feedback they are given, Mr. Bass believes. "As an executive, you're always being watched by employees," he says, "and everything you say gets magnified -- so you teach a lot by how you conduct yourself."

He adds that he learned one of his most important management lessons when he met Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz 13 years ago. Autodesk had just bought the company Mr. Bass had founded and Ms. Bartz, dressed in a business suit, was doing due diligence on the acquisition when Mr. Bass arrived at her office. She stopped everything and gave him her complete attention. "She made me feel like I was the most important person in the world, even though I was dressed in shorts and Birkenstock sandals," says Mr. Bass, who will become CEO when Ms. Bartz becomes executive chairman in May.

Tom Mattia, senior vice president, world-wide communications, at Coca-Cola, has about 90 direct reports, and he says he's trying to "mentor on the go." Last week he traveled from Atlanta to Chicago, New York and Louisville before heading to a weekend meeting in Miami. Next week he will fly to Sydney. "I try to make every interaction I have with someone on my team a teaching experience," he says. "There are always specific work issues that need to get addressed, but then I try to explain my thinking behind an approach so people can get more experience."

Low Costs, Plentiful Talent Make China a Global Magnet for R&D
By KATHY CHEN and JASON DEAN
March 13, 2006; Page A1

BEIJING -- Multinational companies, drawn by a huge and inexpensive talent pool, are pouring money into research and development in China -- a trend that promises to broaden the country's huge role in the global economy.

The total number of foreign-invested R&D centers in the country has surged to about 750 from 200 four years ago, according to China's Ministry of Commerce. And in a survey of multinationals published in September by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, China was by far the most frequently cited location for R&D expansion, well ahead of the U.S. and third-place India, China's chief rival as an emerging innovator.

Still, China's growth as a global R&D hub faces some constraints. Among them is the country's weak protection of patents and other intellectual-property rights. That has encouraged some foreign companies, fearful of risking their trade secrets, to keep more cutting-edge research out of China, analysts say. But others have rushed to expand the scope of their development efforts here.

Whereas R&D investment in China initially focused on adapting existing products and technologies to the Chinese market, companies such as Procter & Gamble Co., Motorola Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., among many others, have been investing to expand their Chinese R&D operations to develop products for the global market.

P&G opened a research arm in China in 1988, consisting of two dozen employees concerned mainly with studying Chinese consumers' laundry habits and oral hygiene. Today, the U.S. consumer-products giant runs five R&D facilities in China with about 300 researchers who work on innovations for everything from Crest toothpaste to Oil of Olay face cream.

The Chinese facilities have been a lead site for developing a new grease-fighting formula of Tide laundry detergent that sells in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. At one facility in Beijing's university district, researchers use computer modeling to tinker with other promising formulas that chemists in white lab coats and protective glasses then mix and test. "We are developing capabilities in China that we can use globally," says Dick Carpenter, director of P&G Technology (Beijing) Ltd.

Giving impetus to the R&D expansion in sectors from biotechnology to pharmaceuticals to semiconductors is China's government. Having enlisted foreign investment to transform China into a manufacturing powerhouse over the past few decades, Beijing now is mounting a campaign to strengthen domestic innovation that could help push the country into more advanced niches of the global economy.

In his annual report at the National People's Congress in Beijing, which ends tomorrow, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said the central government will increase spending on science and technology by nearly 20% this year. "China has entered a stage in its history where it must increase its reliance on scientific and technological advances and innovation to drive social and economic development," he said.

China's State Council, or cabinet, recently said the country would seek to boost R&D investment to 2% of gross domestic product in 2010 and 2.5% by 2020. At a news conference Friday, senior officials outlined tax breaks and other tools they plan to use to meet that target. Last year, total R&D spending in China -- not including foreign investment -- reached $29.4 billion, rising steadily from $11.13 billion in 2000, according to the government.

China faces numerous obstacles to joining the ranks of the world's innovation leaders -- beyond its weak intellectual-property protections. Research spending is still small compared with that of developed countries; the U.S., for example, spends about 2.7% of GDP on R&D, compared with 1.3% of GDP in China last year. And much of what is spent in China still comes from foreign companies: Less than a quarter of Chinese midsize and large enterprises had their own science and technology institutions in 2004. Of China's high-tech exports, valued at $218.3 billion last year, nearly 90% was produced by foreign-invested companies, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

Still, the R&D trend is bolstering China's position relative to other developing countries, particularly India, which is also seeking to build its innovation abilities. India's total domestic spending on R&D rose an estimated 9.7% to $4.9 billion, or 0.77% of GDP, in the fiscal year ended March 2005, according to India's Ministry of Science and Technology.

India is also trying to build R&D, "but the scale of investment [compared with China] is not much" because of budgetary constraints, says V.S. Ramamurthy, a top official at the ministry. Foreign investment in Indian R&D has also lagged behind that of China, he says. And while Mr. Ramamurthy argues that the amount of investment isn't the only way to measure R&D success, "it is a concern for us."

Zhang Jun, director of the China Center for Economic Studies at Shanghai's Fudan University, says that given time, "China's advantages in this area will become more obvious...and its attractiveness will increasingly become stronger than India's."

Among China's draws, he says: the relatively low cost of hiring engineers and researchers; a huge talent pool, including five million university graduates annually (one-fifth majoring in science or engineering); and China's own huge market of 1.3 billion consumers. China offers its students abroad incentives to return once they graduate, including generous research grants and chances to run their own R&D projects.

One early returnee is Enge Wang. Mr. Wang, who had worked as a research associate at the University of Houston, decided to return to Beijing to conduct research under a Chinese Academy of Sciences program in 1995. At the time, he says, his U.S. colleagues and friends questioned his decision, but he says he is glad he made the move. Today, Mr. Wang is director of the Institute of Physics under the academy, one of China's top research organizations, which is engaged in several R&D cooperative ventures with foreign companies.

China's "research funding is getting much better," Mr. Wang says, and as a result, overseas Chinese are flocking back from top U.S. institutions like Harvard University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Talented returnees can secure enough backing "to build up their own lab and extend their research in one direction for 10 years," he says. "It's hard to find such conditions elsewhere."

"There's been a paradigm shift among foreign companies in China," says Chen Zhu, a Chinese Academy of Sciences vice president. "Now, more foreign companies realize China is not just a market but a country with huge amounts of talent."

Motorola, which began investing in low-level R&D in China in 1993, now has 16 R&D offices in five Chinese cities, with an accumulated investment of about $500 million. The U.S. company has more than 1,800 Chinese engineers, and the number is expected to surpass 2,000 this year. They have recently begun developing new phones and other products for sale not only in China, but also overseas, executives say.

One phone developed in China, the A780, lets users write on the screen with just a finger, rather than a stylus. It's now available in the U.S. and Europe. Another phone that can scan contact information from business cards using a built-in camera and enter it into a contact database is expected to be marketed in the U.S. "China is moving from the manufacturing center into advanced R&D," says Ching Chuang, who heads Motorola's Chinese R&D operations.

Microsoft Corp.'s basic-research lab in Beijing was only its second outside the U.S. when it opened in 1998. That China lab now employs about 200 full-time scientists, and the software giant expects its total R&D headcount in China to double in this year to about 800 researchers.

At IBM's research lab in Beijing, Chinese scientists have led the development of several technologies now being used abroad. Among them: "voice morphing" software that can convert typescript or a recorded voice into another voice. "Our R&D now has a global mission," says Thomas S. Li, director of IBM China Research Lab.

At the state-run Institute of Computing Technology, engineers are tackling one of technology's tougher challenges: designing a computer microprocessor. Though still many years behind industry leaders like Intel Corp., the institute last year unveiled its second-generation microprocessor, with about the same computing power as mainstream chips in the late 1990s. This year, it plans to finish work on a third-generation chip that could narrow the gap.

China is also emerging as an R&D force in such sectors as nanotechnology, biotech and genetically modified crops. It was the first country to establish a full rice genome database, which has helped Chinese scientists develop hardier and higher-yielding strains of the staple cereal.

Swiss pharmaceuticals companies Novartis AG and Debiopharm SA have teamed up with the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica under the Chinese Academy of Sciences to conduct research into traditional Chinese medicines to look for treatments for malaria and Alzheimer's disease. "This last decade, the progress we have seen in China's scientific research sector is phenomenal," says Ju Li-ya, director of Debiopharm's China department.