Networker: Running out of workers
It would be suicidal for any government to be honest about long-term employment prospects. So every time the government cuts another job, or encourages corporations to do the same, it talks about opportunities in the "new economy".
State and federal governments are especially enthusiastic about the internet and information technology (IT) in general. In an increasingly casualised workforce it is better to pretend that in the future everyone will be a knowledge worker, rather than a part-time sandwich maker.
So where do IT workers come from? What training has prepared the information warriors of today?
There are many groups of workers in the information technology field: programmers, database analysts, data communications engineers, maintenance technicians, operators, support staff and more.
Traditionally their training has taken place anywhere but in private industry. Tens of thousands of students at universities get some core skills, such as the languages required for programming computers. Tens of thousands more study electronics at technical colleges.
Taking that theoretical knowledge and turning it into practical skills has traditionally depended primarily on some form of government employment. Many programmers started in government. Many technicians gained their experience in some branch of the military or in the government-owned phone company.
Today things are changing, with a conscious move by governments to "privatise" this training and reduce government employment of IT workers. Individual workers have become responsible for their own initial and ongoing training, creating a highly profitable business for technology corporations.
This new face of training has a few problems: it is personally expensive, it is not particularly good, and it is a hopelessly inadequate way to deal with generalised skills shortage.
With individual courses costing up to $1000 a day and certification courses potentially costing tens of thousands of dollars, training becomes part of the barrier for non-IT workers to break into the field. Even if a skilled contractor can get $2000 to $3000 a week, the initial training cost can be prohibitive.
Much of the training provided is purely skills training. For example, companies such as Microsoft, Cisco and Novell have complex and expensive "certified engineer" courses. Leaving aside the product indoctrination, they only give technicians the skills required to support a particular version of a product.
When an upgrade is launched, this information is often of no value. Workers gain little understanding of any principles underlying the products, and few tools to help them migrate or generalise their knowledge.
For these and other reasons, the individually motivated technicians who get the needed skills are few, relative to the needs of companies wanting to use all the latest technologies. This is especially true with the new internet technologies.
The alternative of university-based skills training is little better, regardless of the willingness of universities to make their graduates more "work ready". Working with limited funding and old equipment, skills gained are hopelessly outdated even before the students graduate.
In the US, the solution is simply to pay for a large proportion of the world's brightest and best-trained to migrate there. Australia is hardly in a state to follow, so the neo-liberal capitalist governments of Liberal or Labor, denied the traditional option of providing real technical training to large numbers of technical workers, just announce their intention to do their best.
BY GREG HARRIS