IBM's answer to IT skills crunch: Woo students

As part of an expanded outreach to college IT students, IBM is releasing a set of Web-based tools and resources to help them hone marketable skills in the fastest-growing IT job opportunities.

IBM is adding a section to the Web site of its long-standing Academic Initiative program, which until now has focused mainly on working with faculties who teach IT and IT-related courses. The new section is designed for students, with tutorials, games, skills assessments and online forums that can supplement, and be incorporated with, regular college and university courses.

“Our key concern is the ‘skills pipeline,’” says Kevin Faughnan, an IBM veteran who’s been director of the company’s Academic Initiative since 2004. The mega-trends of globalization and services-oriented economies are made possible by information technology, creating a growing U.S. and global demand for IT skills, he says. "The information system -- the hardware and software and networking ‘complex’ -- is what’s driving the services-oriented businesses,” he says. “They need young workers who have the skills to continue innovating."

And these companies can no longer afford the lengthy and costly internal training programs that have been standard features of the business landscape, according to Faughnan. Young workers need to be productive sooner, with skills that are ready to be used. (Read “Wanted: 10 IT skills employers need today.)

College and university faculty understand this, Faughnan says. And the expanded Web resources are part of IBM’s commitment to facilitate this skills development in colleges and universities, in conjunction with the company’s existing collaboration with faculties.

Click to see: Chart of five fastest growing technology skills

But the nature of these skills and the role they play in the developing global economy mean that IT skills are no longer limited to IT professionals, but become an important, even essential, part of other business disciplines such as marketing, accounting, security and business process re-engineering. So IBM’s outreach extends beyond computer science departments to include areas such as business.

Brandeis International Business School, part of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is using IBM’s 3-D video game, Innov8, unveiled last November, as a complementary tool for teaching business process management. In the game, a student becomes an outside consultant working with a company to re-engineer a business process in its call center, says Preeta Banerjee, assistant professor of strategy at the school.

It takes one to two hours to go through the scenario, and students write up and then talk over their impressions and reactions. As members of the Academic Initiative program, Banerjee and other faculty have taken students to IBM’s Lexington campus to meet with employees whose job is re-designing business processes. IBM says about 100 institutions of all types and sizes are now using Innov8.

IBM has keyed many of the new student resources to emerging skills that are in high demand. Many of these are in Web services and Web application development, database, and open source programming.