Talent Pool Worries Silicon Valley Businesses
PALO ALTO--High school senior Max Butin watched the technology bubble burst from his after-school job at a pizza parlor in Silicon Valley. Suddenly, he noticed, nobody was ordering toppings.
Then his mother, a recruiter for high-tech companies, found herself out of work, and the sputtering economy hit home. But Butin, 18, said that the whirlwind cycle of boom and bust that marked his teenage years has not deterred him from wanting to be an automotive design engineer.
He gathered on a recent afternoon with other committed technology students in the robotics lab of Palo Alto Senior High School, where they meet after class to build robots for a national competition in Florida.
Now that the hype is gone, “Only the people who are really interested in it do it,” Butin said. “I’ve always been interested in engineering.”
Home-Grown Talent Needed
Businesses in Silicon Valley view the situation with concern. Their future prosperity depends to a strong degree on developing a larger pool of home-grown technical talent, and a recent study shows that not nearly enough young people in the area say they are interested in going into technical jobs to meet the expected demands of the region’s labor market.
Even before the layoffs started to mount in Silicon Valley, two-thirds of students here said they did not plan to pursue technology or computer-related careers, according to a regional survey of 2,500 students in grades eight and 11 published this month by the Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network and the consulting firm A.T. Kearney. In the survey, conducted in late 2000, 39% of students polled said high-tech careers are uninteresting, and 25% characterized the jobs as intimidating.
Girls Even Less Interested
Girls’ interest in high-tech jobs was even less. Only 23% of females said they wanted to pursue such careers, while 42% of boys expressed interest in technology jobs.
“About two years ago, almost every kid you talked to wanted to be a computer engineer of one kind or another,” recalls Nina Denton, a career guidance counselor at Carlmont High School in Belmont, which is about halfway between San Francisco and Palo Alto. “Now there’s a much wider variety of interests.”
For businesses, students’ attitude toward technology is troubling--and costly.
According to the study, the so-called “work force gap” made up almost 40% of the technology sector’s labor demand during the late 1990s. The gap measures unfilled positions, workers who were actively recruited from outside the Bay Area, and employees who commute to their jobs from outside Silicon Valley.
Even with the economic downturn, the survey claims that the workforce gap amounts to 25% of the labor market demand.
Recruiting high-tech workers from outside the area costs Silicon Valley businesses an estimated $2 billion to $3 billion annually in hiring expenses, decreased productivity, delays, lost sales, salary premiums and turnover costs, according to the study. During the boom, these costs were estimated as high as $6 billion to $7 billion.
“It’s critical that we have enough technologists who are highly trained, who can come in and understand our business. Even our legal department needs to be able to understand technology,” said Dierdre Hanford, senior vice president of business and market development for Synopsys, a 3,000-person company based in Mountain View that makes design automation products used to create microchips and electronics systems.
“We can’t just keep displacing people and importing talent from elsewhere,” said Hanford, who was an advisor on the study.
Educators worry as well that a lack of interest in high-technology is but one symptom of a greater problem in math and science learning, particularly among minority and lower-income students.
The survey found that Latino students were less likely to have access to computers at home, and were less aware of high-tech careers than their counterparts from other racial groups. Although 61% of Latino students said they had some understanding of two or more high-technology jobs, the numbers were 76% among white students, 79% among Asian students, and 80% among African Americans.
Larry Aceves, superintendent of the Franklin-McKinley School District in the predominantly minority neighborhoods of East San Jose, said a great many of the students in his district are recent arrivals from other countries. “A lot of their parents are not well educated. Getting them to picture themselves in those roles is not easy,” said Aceves, who also contributed to the study.
“My first concern is I want the kids to be proficient in math because those are the keys to the kingdom. If you can’t get through algebra and into higher math, you’re not going to get through the university system,” Aceves said.
At Palo Alto High’s robotics lab, the technology bubble’s bursting has had a tangible impact. The club’s chief sponsor, Compaq Computer Corp., was only able to offer the group 20% of the financial support it had given in previous years. The club turned to individual donors to try to make up the shortfall.
Yet Tracy Becker, a 17-year-old senior who plans to study electrical engineering in college, said she doesn’t care that technology has lost some of its glamour. “I guess going into technology seems riskier to me than it used to, but if that was something I wanted to do, it wouldn’t stop me. As long as you have skills you will be in demand,” she said.
