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U.S. Cites Shortage of High-Tech Workers

The Commerce Department, joining a chorus of technology industry leaders, yesterday issued its first warning that a growing shortage of workers with cutting-edge computer skills could hinder the nation's economic growth.

In delivering that message, officials said the Commerce and Education departments would take the unusual step of working with the technology industry to jointly propose solutions to the labor shortage through a series of task forces and a nationwide summit to be held early next year.

"We clearly have a very significant supply problem," Andrew Pincus, the Commerce Department's general counsel, said at a news conference yesterday. The shortage "is increasing the cost of doing business throughout this country and reducing our global competitiveness and constraining our economic growth."

The department, in a report released yesterday, did not specify the cost of the shortage. The report, titled America's New Deficit: The Shortage of Information Technology Workers, repeated statistics produced by other organizations, including the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), which estimates about 190,000 information technology jobs nationwide are going unfilled.

The report also cited Labor Department projections that between now and 2005, an average of 95,000 new computer scientists, systems analysts and programmers will be needed every year. In 1994, however, only 24,553 U.S. students earned bachelor's degrees in computer or information sciences fields, the Labor Department said.

A recent study sponsored by the Northern Virginia Technology Council estimated that more than 19,000 technology jobs are vacant in Northern Virginia. Yesterday, Virginia Gov. George Allen (R) awarded $5.85 million in economic development grants, including $2.4 million earmarked for Northern Virginia, to support programs to train more technology workers.

In Northern Virginia, the money would be used to establish worker training centers, career awareness programs, partnerships between schools and businesses and a summer technology-training program at Northern Virginia Community College campuses.

"Our skilled-worker shortage is a crisis," said Harris Miller, the president of the ITAA, an Arlington-based industry group working with the Commerce and Education departments on the task forces and summit. "This is as if we had run out of iron ore in the middle of the second industrial revolution. Today, [information technology] workers are the equivalent of iron ore. They're the crucial raw materials of our economy."

Critics, however, suggest that the ITAA has inflated its shortage estimates both to justify its call for Congress and the Clinton administration to relax immigration restrictions on temporary technology workers and to compel the government to pick up the tab for training programs. Those skeptics contend that technology companies aren't doing enough to attract and train workers with basic computer skills.

"This report is a tool of special interests," said Norm Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis. "Sure, there are a lot of unfilled positions. That's because the industry wants workers with a laundry list of skills, but they're not willing to train people or give them a chance to pick up those skills on the job."

The ITAA denies that its estimates are inflated or connected with its immigration-lobbying efforts.

The six task forces will focus on issues such as recruiting unrepresented minority groups into technology careers, improving math and science education in primary and secondary schools, spicing up the image of information-technology jobs and upgrading skills of people already in the work force, officials said. The groups, which will start meeting this fall, will have representatives from industry, educational institutions and the Commerce and Education departments.

The meetings will culminate with a summit in January at the University of California at Berkeley.

Staff writer Eric Lipton contributed to this report.