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IBM Training Employees To Leave IBM?
lucabrasi999 writes "IBM just launched a new program that will encourage some employees to earn teaching certificates and degrees. IBM will help defray the costs of these new degrees. With those newly earned degrees, the IBM employee would then become a 'former' IBM employee who moves onto a career as a public school math or science teacher. While it seems odd that IBM would encourage employees to switch careers, the point is that IBM is trying to help offset an expected shortage in the number of math and science teachers in the United States." From the article: "While many companies encourage their employees to tutor schoolchildren or do other things to get involved in education, IBM believes it is the first to guide workers toward switching into a teaching career. The company expects older workers nearing retirement to be the most likely candidates, partly because they would have more financial wherewithal to take the pay cut that becoming a teacher likely would entail."
My guess is, they're just trying to pick up some good karma, "encouraging" people to pick up a teaching career and leave, instead of just laying them off life HP did. That way, they'll be able to cut their employment costs, at the same time still retaining a positive image.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
With moves like this and their support of the open source scene, you'd think that they'd be Slashdot's new baby by now. :)
Goo goo g'joob.
This is just amazing! While other companies encourage employees to get advance degrees to help yourself, no other company encourges employees to get advance degrees to help others. Excellent!
That's nicer than firing them.
If there's anything America needs, it's more science teachers.
math & science with a french accent?
This definitely sounds like one of the most altruistic actions of a company I've ever heard. This will certainly lead to some happier employees. But it can also lead to more college professors having IBM experience, which could lead to students better educated to work at IBM. Not only does it help the industry, in the very long term it can come back to help IBM. This seems like fantastic foresight on IBM's part.
Developers: We can use your help.
It's called not paying unemployment/severance out.
Short term PR benefits, long term business and economy benefits. Can't argue with that.
I have some friends at EA and during their interiew, they were basically told 'you arent going to finish up that masters degree'
Shortage is IBM's mainframe skills, not math and science in research. IBM is running on its last generation of mainframe employees. Many of which will retire in no more than 10 years. You want a job? Get into mainframes and you'll be looking at 60-80k salary easy. The companies deploying mainframes aren't going to discontinue anytime.
This is really just a cost-cutting maneuver to encourage older employees to leave, similar to early retirement payouts.
Rob
Well, maybe they view it as a bit of an investment. Put some of their workers into teaching now, so that the upcoming generation(s) of people are well-educated in science, math, engineering, etc. by people with degrees and real-life experience. Then IBM has a better talent pool to pick from in the future, theoretically.
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My (engineer) father was axed from his company one year before retirement. No one wants to hire an aging engineer in this market, so he took up high-school teaching as a last resort. It was a huge pay cut, but at least he could maintain medical benefits. He has an 70 mile commute every morning, since entry-level teachers were not in high demand.
What a great way to get aging (i.e., expensive health benefits) workers off your payroll, but make them productive members of society in another role.
We have approx 76 mln pre-k - 12 students in the US. Do we really need 250k math & science teachers?
Assume 1 teacher can teach 4 classes per year to 20 students per class and that means that 20mln students aren't getting the math & science education they need? over 1 in 4? wow!
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The DoD and DoE has had this for years.
Troops to Teachers
Still...not too shabby.
They would set up "The IBM Teaching Foundation" and pay the people who take them up on this offer the difference between their last annual salary at IBM and their new teaching position.
Surely they could afford to take some of their billions in annual profit and fund the new foundation. http://www.intltwins.org/Twin, Triplet, or more?
What effect will this have on the employees' pension plans? Anyone know? It seems like IBM might have an incentive to do this to help ease the pain of paying pension as older employees retire. I don't know anything about their arrangements and rules. I'm not saying IBM is doing this out of evil but rather that it could be an arrangement that benefits both IBM and its older employees and not to mention students in the US. It seems a plan like this just to benefit American students is too long term for a corporation. Furthermore, the cost of pensions is proving to be a serious drag for many US companies. Just have a hunch and am wondering.
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The biggest issue is pay. K-12 teaching is a low-paid, low-status job, and in high school, it involves dealing with a lot of hassles from the 50% of the students who don't want to be there, and are just being warehoused by the government until they turn 18. Often the people who go into K-12 teaching are liberal arts majors who were mediocre students in college, and decided relatively late in the game to become teachers, because they weren't really qualified to do much else. For those people, the pay and job conditions might be OK, but people who are actually qualified to teach math or science have better options.
The effective government monopoly on education is preventing math and science teachers from being paid anything more in line with what they could get in a free market, and it also turns schools into assembly lines that produce students who pretend to have learned math and science, but actually couldn't calculate their way out of a paper sack. Part of the psychology of a government monopoly is to drag everybody down to the level of the lowest common denominator. Here, that means the lowest common denominator for both students and teachers.
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Pretty fitting if you think about it. Earlier this year, IBM encouraged Apple to switch to Intel x86 based processors. Draw your own conclusion if that means the PowerPC series of chips is reaching its retirement years...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I don't know about you guys, but every year a greater percentage of the engineers that I work with are Indian or Asian. A few decades ago, we were world technology leaders, all with home grown talent.
Now we're less educated than ever before.
The government could double the existing education budget and fix our school systems, get more teachers, and build the infrastructure that has been lost and not rebuilt for decades. There are plenty of places that we spend money that aren't as important.
At least IBM sees the crisis as it looms over us, if the government doesn't. An educated populace means there's a country worth defending, move a tiny portion of the defense budget to education, dammit!
Kudos, IBM. At least somebody has an eye on the ball.
What IBM is doing is encouraging people to get jobs elsewhere, because it is their goal to replace those people with cheap labor from third world countries anyway. It's better for your image to educate someone and "let them leave" than to announce layoffs and hire people from India.
The fact is that IBM would like American and European labor to exit the company so they can pick up Indian and Chinese labor. They want us out, and they're trying to do it nicely.
There's no altruism here.
What a great concept: fire the old guys, hire a new kind of employee: the guest worker (who can't vote, can't form a union, can't quit, gets paid less). The old guys can get jobs as teachers for the new guys' kids!
Who said the rich guys rigging the system for their benefit was a bad thing?
Before it was Slashdoted, and it seems like a Short and long term win win Situation:
IBM Wins, short term: Good karma, and reducing (somewhat) their headcount.
Employee wins: A new career, pursued while still having IBM benefits (like health plan) and partial salary, because they will be in a leave of absence.
IBM wins, long term: Continuin g supply of skilled workforce
Society wins: Teachers.
This is a sort of thing that companies have been doing for a lon time, but this is a very innovative way for them to do it... kudos to IBM.
In Venezuela we dub this "La cajita feliz" (the happy meal, a reference to McDonalds kids lunch). When you offer incentives to the employees to leave on their own will, therefore reducing headcount without layoffs.
Our PTT, CANTV, did this. In HP now, to reach their staffing targets, they anounced a change of the early retirement policy, and many employees arte taking advantage before the deadline, so, in the end, they will reduce the workforce by some number X of employees, but they will have laid off a number less than x, the others leaving on their own volition....
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Sounds like the University of Illinois!
Unfortunately, that's not the reality. A friend of mine graduated with a teaching degree in Chemistry. She got a job teaching high school. She was laid-off after a year (her contract wasn't renewed). Why? Because of budget cuts. Football and baseball programs get the money these days instead of music or science.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
I wonder if these elderly employees are also taking a substantial "pension cut" when leaving before reaching retirement age?
By spending cash on a teaching certificate and encouraging its elderly employees to leave IBM could be saving money they don't have to spend on pension.
Considering some of the fine grade of "people" I've met in the IT field, this is nothing new - I've been encouraging many of them to change careers for years now!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Imagine a society wherein people did this regularly. Instead of going to school to be a teacher and getting most of your experience from that, teachers were retirees who had worked in the field they were teaching. This wasn't the case for me until college and then only with certain professors. I can only imagine how much more interesting it would have been if my highschool chemistry teacher had been an engineer at DuPont instead of a woman who had specialized in English when getting her teaching degree.
I stole this sig from a more creative user.
This one is not offensive or anything, why not mod it off topic instead? I swear read posts before you moderate them!
Zonk, IBM wants the older workers to switch careers, not just anyone.
It wouldn't make sense that IBM would ask their most productive workers to leave work. They just want the deadwood out.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
The singular of data is not anecdote.
Double the salary of teachers, and you will find enough teachers. Triple the salary of teachers, and you will find too many teachers.
The free market works fine. The problem is slick, sneaky politicians (e.g. Republicrats or Democans) who refuse to raise the salary of teachers to a level that is commensurate with that of an engineer or physician.
This definitely sounds like one of the most altruistic actions of a company I've ever heard.
You've got to be kidding me if you're saying you believe that.
This will certainly lead to some happier employees.
This will certainly lead to LESS employees, which is what IBM wants.
But it can also lead to more college professors having IBM experience, which could lead to students better educated to work at IBM.
You don't want to work for IBM, trust me.
Not only does it help the industry, in the very long term it can come back to help IBM. This seems like fantastic foresight on IBM's part.
This seems like poor foresight on your part. You seriously can't see it? IBM wants people out. They don't want higher educated (And higher paid) Western employees, they want lower paid Eastern employees, probably contracted out. This isn't about goodwill, this is about the Almighty Dollar. You have fallen victim to IBM's clever PR marketing. The commercials, with innovative people in a fresh, exciting company- it's all front. It's not like that within the company. Inside it's as dull and bureaucratic as it can get.
By the way, in case you haven't guessed by now, I work for IBM.
...give itself a haircut. All the old grey hairs are getting the axe. They don't want to have to deal with their shit anymore so they give them an "alternative" to being let go for being old and slow.
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
Then again, my sample ( I concede, a whole 3 districts) has the same problem. I'm beginning to think that this may be a large problem and what my friend went through is just a singular instance of such.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
Sponsoring individual students, however, is hit-or-miss and expensive. On the other hand, sponsoring a teacher (who may well have a class of anywhere between several dozen to several hundred) is cheap, efficient and much more likely to produce "good results" (in terms of useful employees).
My guess is that IBM is planning on pushing their names to the classes and on aggressively recruiting the best. That way, they get to "upgrade" their workforce to a younger generation (who will be cheaper, as a result) who know everything IBM needs them to know (because it's IBM staffers doing the teaching) AND who also know all the latest-generation stuff on top of that (because they're learning today, as opposed to a decade ago).
That would cut costs, multiply workforce quality AND massively boost their image, all in one go.
Oh, and because the IBM staffers will do the steering, the students may well end up worse employees for competitors...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I was under the impression that changing careers to be a teacher later in life is a bad idea from a retirement fund standpoint. Many (most?) public school teachers don't pay into Social Security; they pay into an investment fund (similar to the the way members of Congress do it). This won't amount to much unless you start teaching when you're young, and Social Security benefits go down when you start putting money away like this.
Sounds like brainwashing to me. If you don't have a physical establishment like McD's, why not bring your brainwashing right to the consumer?
EVIL!
Why does this remind me of the Peace Corps? E.g., I wonder if the new science teachers will be warned of the hazards of certain public schools... or state legislatures...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
Teachers get paid "teh suck". Public education in this country (US-centric, sorry) was hijacked by the federal government so now all the money that used to be available for actual teachers now goes to federal bureaucrats that try to maintain teaching quality from state-to-state and unionized secretaries that have had their job for the last 60 years.
So you get school superintendents that get paid 70k, school principals that get paid 50k, and teachers that get paid 20-30k. A dual-teaching-income house in the Midwest runs anywhere from 40k-60k. Yes, that's with BOTH husband and wife working.
I guess if you *love* teaching...
We have 76 million students from preschool to college, not K-12. So that includes about 15 million undergrads. Throw in a few million from preschool (I think kids can wait until they're 5 before learning arithmetic), and the K-12 student population looks a little less dire, pretty much accounting for your missing 20 million.
Frankly, I'm much more concerned about the quality of teachers than the amount of them. I would love to see more teachers come from industry instead of directly out of university.
As a Physicist, first + higher degree who chose teaching rather than research I appreciate a good joke. Aged 47, after 22 years of teaching (in two good state schools in the UK ) I an worn out. I hope (unlikely though) to break out into another career. Any long term IBM'er - don't do it - the pace will kill you - its a young persons job - this week I have done 60 + hours and am still not doing the job 'properly'. Experience helps cut crap. Do I regret it - no, is it hard - yes.
Or what was that "program" called again?
sig? Oh, that sig...
It may well be that those who can manage grade school sciences will do so no matter the number of teachers available.
As a society we may benefit more by making math & science teachers available to those few who show the ability and willingness to jump the hurdles necessary to gaining the knowledge. Under democracy there is a tendency, now not as strong as it was a few decades ago, to belief that give an equal chance all participants are as likely to excell in any give arena. This is a Romantic belief.
It may be we'd better benefit from underwriting math & science teaching in postsecondary education where ample and good teachers might pay off in a bigger dividend; rather than pumping resources into grade school education in the mistaken belief that the reason there are fewer students doing well in the maths & sciences is that society is not providing the basic opportunity.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I'm one of several people who got a job with IBM, mastered our skill area, and then moved on to other companies willing to pay the market rate. So yes, I was trained by IBM to leave IBM.
(Psst, hey IBM! I would have stayed for the mere price of a modest raise the last two years I was there. You know, something better than 0.0%. Hm, no raise when you work in the most profitable division of the company? Why should I have stayed?)
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
Since when is a teaching degree considered 'Advanced'? It's generally been well understood for some decades that it's somewhat less work than an English degree, and other than the monopoly guaranteed job field, somewhat less useful.
Sure, employees benefit if they are considering a career change to teaching. And yes, it has been spun to seem like an altruistic move on the part of IBM, although it might indeed have a beneficial effect on education.
One thing this does for IBM, however, is to reduce the average cost of an employee. Hiring fresh grads, or the barely experienced, is much cheaper than retaining the high-paid dinosaurs.
If IBM can slowly trim the high-paid of its workforce with good feelings on both sides, wonderful.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Sure they are thinking of themselves. But this is a very good way to please everyone. They do need the future science & math students, but instead of complaining their ready to do something constructive about it. How many of the other companies would do the same? Actually i wouldnt be surprised if some company would sue the government for not educating enough workers, thats the way they handle all other problems... And its much nicer to give an employee another job than to fire him/her...
It's well known that IBM has paid out reparations to Jews who were arrested and deported in part because of the efficient technology for classifying people IBM provided to the Nazis.
Thomas Watson received a medal from Hitler. He kept the medal for several years until he was forced to return it, around the time the US entered the war.
Don't let this tricks fool you. IBM are evil
Or they were a lost kid who didn't know what to do with their life and decided that teaching (9 mos. a year) was a nice compromise to actually working.
I'm sorry, but I don't think teachers are underparid for what they do - contrary to what the PR that the teachers unions put out. Don't beleive me? Just look at my grammer and spewllign!
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
Whats the point of having more math and science teachers if industry can't create jobs for those people already with backgrounds in engineering, math, and science. Its seems a little absurd for companies to complain about a lack of engineers in thise country when they turn around tell the current pool to become teachers since their job services are being sent overseas. Students would do better to get degrees in marketing and law and learn how to twist words to deceive people into buying shitty products then they would actually working to build useful things for society and then getting laid off.
I was unaware that the pharmaceutical firms were selling crack.
John
Shareholder lawsuit coming in 5, 4, 3, 2. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Why is this JUST PR? Perhaps there will be some good PR bennies out of such a move. But if you look at the trends, many aging Boomers do not want to "fully" retire, but want to ease into a part time productivity situation. And there are surprisingly few partial productivity avenues for these older experienced workers.
If IBM picks up the tab for retraining (instead of laying off and placing this burden on the government), and creates an option that clears barriers for some people to make a move that they may like to (but find prohibitive under your traditional corporate shackles) I'd give them kudos, not assume that it's all an underhanded downsizing experiment.
IBM just launched a new program that will encourage some employees to earn teaching certificates and degrees. IBM will help defray the costs of these new degrees. With those newly earned degrees, the IBM employee would then become a 'former' IBM employee who moves onto a career as a public school math or science teacher. While it seems odd that IBM would encourage employees to switch careers, the point is that IBM is trying to help offset an expected shortage in the number of math and science teachers in the United States.
It's amazing how bad things have gone for the IT industry in just 6 years. I know most of us still think of the free-market 'American Way' as the best way to go, but it grieves me deeply to see this industry in such dire straights.
It's one thing to take a 6-month vocational track to be a textile worker, and have your job ship oversees forcing you to retrain. But many IT people worked for 8-12 years in high-school and college to get good grades with a bs or ms in CS, CE, CIT. Dumping these people into teaching jobs is a travesty. I can't blame IBM however, at least they're acknowledging the problem and doing something.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I don't think the "likely" is an appropriately strong word to describe the chances that the person will receive a paycut going from a development job to a public teaching post. Perhaps calling it a "certain" paycut or "drastic" paycut is more realistic.
When I was in college, I got a secondary education ("high school") degree in addition to my computer science major. Throughout most of my schooling, I assumed that I would end up as a teacher rather than a software developer. In fact, it wasn't until I did my stint at student teaching ("practice" teaching in other countries, maybe?) and started getting some job offers did I come crashing down to reality.
In reality, the pay disparity is ludicrous. My mentoring teacher had been at the job for 15 years and was a wonderful and passionate educator. Yet my first job offer for a software developer position not only matched what she made but was some 10% higher. That's 15 years of dedicated improvement to her craft vs straight out of college. That offer was also roughly 85% more than I would have made as a starting teacher. Now, eight years later, I am making nearly (but not quite) 3x more than I would be had I remained in the teaching position. So calling it a "likely" paycut just isn't strong enough.
The shortage of math and science teachers isn't just due to the pay disparity, though. IMO, the other "big" knock against being a math or science teacher is that your students will fight you every step of the way unless you luck out with advanced classes (calculus, AP chem, etc). Facing a sea of disintrested or hostile faces in the "mandatory" classes can be soul-deadening.
But if you're close to retirement and have enough of a financial buffer to handle the massive paycut and enough passion for teaching to block out the soul-suckers, then this is a wonderful offer. Kudos to IBM for taking the lead on this!
For years I've been considering to start teaching. I just love explaining science stuff. Used to be the scare of the secretaries at the office where I worked who had to type text they didn't understand, and didn't want to understand. When I nevertheless explained it to them they said: Hey, it isn't that difficult. So, maybe I've got a knack for it.
What is the science teacher market, these days like in the US? Any chance for fairly fluent, but non-native speakers of English?
Bert
- IBM's workforce gets reduced (but only where they want).
- Their corporate image doesn't get savaged. Indeed this is excellent PR.
- They might save some money, since severence packages for long-term employees can be substantial.
-
Moral, both for current and former employees, remains intact.
Just like in their battles with SCO, IBM manages to achieve a number of things at once.Even if I have a great teacher that instills in me a love of math and science, if I can't find a job that pays in those areas, I'm still going to become a lawyer (probably getting into IP law because I love science and math). College costs too much these days to allow one to wait for a slow payoff or to study the things you love without any thought as to how to monetize the experience. As such, if IBM really wants to increase the number of people going into science and technology, shouldn't they be looking at decreasing the number of jobs in these areas that they ship out of the country, too?
That is all.
Yeah, they're not going to get a livable wage from the school's retirement fund, and they know that. Most of the retiring IBMmers I know (mid 50s) already have pretty nice pensions and retirement packages set up from their 30 years of service. If they didn't, they'd be working till age 65 like ordinary people.
John
Look, there's already an estimated 50,000 math teachers in the US. This move by IBM may add another 5,000. Who the hell needs 75,000 math teachers?
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
It's a bunch of IBM sleeper cells!
If we really wanted to have enough qualified people to teach math and science (or anything else, for that matter), we wouldn't pay them like chumps. I am by no means saying that they *are* chumps, but we sure do pay them that way.
Corporations make money by exploiting poor populations
Hold on there a minute, who exactly is being exploited by the evil corporations? You do realise that if they paid western wages to most of the people they employ in third world countries, it would put them in the top 1% of wage earners? Are their skills worth that?
And by the way, we are talking about employment here. These people have few prospects to better themselves, and are trapped in a vicious circle of desperate poverty the likes of which you can barely imagine. You haven't seen just how bad it can get until you visit someplace like Smoke Mountain, in Manila. Nothing like seeing hundreds of people rooting through trash from dawn till dusk for a few cents worth of recyclables to put things in perspective. You can google it, but I rather advise you don't. It ain't pretty.
So foreign corporations come in and pump in money, and motivate these people to educate themselves, and/or they go to places like America and send money home. Everyone wins, the consumer, the "exploited" workers, the corporations, everyone except the people whose jobs they took.
Theres only one answer to your problem, I'm afraid. Start your own corporation. Its not as hard as it seems.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Not only that, but if they will higher-end teaching positions with profs that preach the virtues of IBM products... well
1 IBM employee lost to teaching... 100s of possible customers at a rate of 30+/semester
Sounds pretty smart to me.
Especially of the older, more highly-paid employees if you're planning to cut staff. It's a good idea, personnel cuts aren't painful and everybody wins.
replace "will higher-end" with "fill higher-end"
Are you talking about employees losing their pensions if they leave IBM? Some pension plans may be structured that way; if you leave before retirement age, you forfeit the whole pension. With other plans, you keep your pension benefits if you're fully vested by the time you leave. You still begin collecting at the specified retirement age, but you could leave to work somewhere else until age 65. TFA doesn't say anything about pensions.
You have been used. The people who promote the idea that IBM the company and its employees are Nazi sympathizers were exposed as criminals when their lawsuit against IBM (which just HAPPENED to co-incide with the release of their book) was thrown out of court.
What laid off people from europe?
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
In the economic analyses that I have seen, per hour compensation for teachers is very competitive for similar professions. Average teacher pay is not a problem.
What is a problem is the distribution of that money. Essentially, these are the only two factors that matter in determining your pay in almost every district:
1: Highest degree earned
2: Number of years as a teacher
That it is. Nothing else matters. So some fresh new fool with a BA in communications from Directional State University and a 2.5 GPA is going to get the same pay as a 55-year old manager from IBM, who had had (long ago) a 3.8 GPA from Princeton in Applied Mathematics.
I am sure you can see what the problem is. This is compounded by the fact that teacher pay in almost every district is extremely backloaded. While that average you cited looks nice, you have to slog through a decade of $30-5k/year to get it. Retirement benefits are also heavily backloaded.
It is the unions who are creating this problem. The absurd pay-scales they have created effectively make it impossible to recruit large numbers of math and science majors. Until the pay system is changed, all the blathering in the world will not change this.
Ok, good.. Good.. Forwarrrdd... Wait! -- No! Slow down!
*BONK!*
Ok, ok. Not a big deal. Turn a little to the left. That's it... Walk towards the rectangular frame.... NO! Your other left!
*BONK*!
noooooo! math and science can be hard enough for many students - it's needless to complicate things with an accent that can be either hard to understand or just plain annoying
Okay, companies and and should do GOOD, they just can't do altruism at the shareholders (owner's) expense, that's being a bad fiduciary. That said, there is a wide range of good you can do and justify it...
That said, this actually should accomplish a LOT for IBM.
The target is near-retirees, people that are leaving anyway.
1. If you lay them off, you risk a age-discrimination class-action suit (SCOTUS just allowed disparate affects in age discrimination, though the bar is set high).
2. If they join the public workforce, then they probably snap up the yummy government provided benefits, which gets them off IBM's benefits, at least until they retire from their new profession... Who knows, the ludicrous school retiree benefits may kick in in a short-enough time, that this may get some of the people off their benefits long term.
3. It NEVER hurts to have someone with a MAJORLY positive image of IBM teaching youngsters, the future's consumers and employees. IBM is an old established company, planning for 3 decades isn't unreasonable.
4. Brain Drain - if the person is going to retire soon anyway, you are losing their skill set. If you keep them on "leave of absence" for two years, you can pick their brain (even if not contracted to help, who wouldn't help their company that they were on leave for when called with a question). Also, if they moved into teaching with IBM's help, they are probably very happy with IBM, and may remain accessible for years helping people with arcane problems.
This looks like a HUGE win. IBM is able to do something good for the world, and there are enough plausible business benefits to justify it as a proper fiduciary activity.
Alex
until school districts start counting years of relevant job experience as part of the determinant of your pay.
Right now, if that engineer from DuPont switches to teaching, she starts at the same point in the pay scale as the 23-year-old with no experience at all. This makes the switch almost impossible, as most people in mid-career cannot/will not give up ten or twenty years worth of raises!
It's amazing how people attempt to sprinkle pejoratives into thier arguments like "slave labour" in a thinly veiled attempt to garner simpathy for their arguments by tapping into latent (or not so latent) racist sentiments.
Simply put, like the "japanese" car invasion of the seventies and eighties, the so called "first-world" is going through another "IT" invasion, this time from China and India... This time the US companies are trying a different strategy before they get pummeled (e.g. this is like AMC moving a car plant to Japan). I have no idea if this strategy will work for IBM and other IT companies, but I'm sure they are aware of what happened with the car company strategy (e.g., the K-car).
This is NOT south africa aparthid. This is NOT indonesia nike shoes. This is NOT feeding off the weak, this is a real shift in the industry not unlike shifts that have happened in the past (and will in the future).
In the narrow limited minds of Detroit in the 70's and 80's, there were often racist actions against anyone with "dark" colored skin (e.g., the horrible beating of Vincent Chin, who wasn't even japanese) as the industry shift occurs by people who enjoyed using pejoratives to garner simpathy for their arguments... I hope you aren't aligning yourself with people that have that kind of mindset...
Studies have found that average teacher pay is very competitive on an hourly basis with other, similar professions. Average teacher pay is just fine.
The problems are that it is too heavily back-loaded (starting teachers make squat, old teachers make a mint), that teachers in completely different field earn the same pay (physics is not communications!), and that no regard is given to real-world job experience.
These factors combine to make it almost impossible that someone with a math or science background and years of real job experience would switch to being a teacher. Both their experience and quality degree would be ignored when determining pay, and they would start at the very bottom of a very steep payscale. How many people are going to give up $60k at IMB for $30k as a teacher? Not many.
I recently was told by a friend of mine who works in the Chinese consulat that the chinese "problem" of emmigrants coming to America and getting education is getting out of hand. She quoted that 90% of Chinese citizens that come here on visas to learn end up staying here, which is a big problem for the Chinesem I guess. As a result, China is working on screening their students better to come back to China after they finish their degree.
HJ
My girlfriend makes over $90k per year teaching public school 7th graders in a town just outside of philadelphia (and she is hot). :)
I realize this is an enigma to the average slashdotter.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
This will remain in my mind as possibly the best way a company can divest of employees short of finding another job for them. And some of the reality here is that there ARE fewer and fewer tech jobs in this country. Helping them to switch careers to one where there is presently a heavy need is a very positive move for the country and for the people. Some might scoff and assume it's some PR stunt but I really doubt it. Everyone knows that we have extremely short memories and would forget about any mass firings/layoffs/terminations when the next news story hits.
That said, you can expect their stock values to decline because we all know that doing 'good things' is a waste of resources and drains profit potential... and we all know profit is everything right?
she worked 3/4 quarters of the year. Probably with good benefits, and retirement.
you work all year, probably with moderate benefits, and for only 10% more pay.
so, you work 25% more then her for 10% more pay...now who is making less?
hint: you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
t is not horrible, and pay is one of the things I never here a teach complaign about.
When loking at the numbers, bear in mind that it is for 3/4 of the year, so calculate approprietly.
The schools need stuff.
More teachers, more class, and materials needed to teach.
Oh, and don't spend anymore on computers until a plan is in place on how you are going to use them. Computers are a huge money sink in school systems, with no real plan of action on how they can aid teachers and help the student learn.
Beside, Libraries have computers and research papers, and more people need to be in the habit of using library services.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
IBM has software patents.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
If you can't take as much stress, I don't think that teaching in a public school is the right move to make.
- a glut of math and science teachers,
- a glut of students interested in math and science
when there is no U.S. market for math and science workers.Timing is everything.
Not offensive? Did we read the same post?
1) No one forces teachers to work for such 'low' pay.
2)
For those of you who didn't see the job announcements take a look these news articles!
IBM and SHARE Announce a New Community for the Next Generation of Mainframe Experts.
InformationWeek
Wanted: 20,000 IBM Mainframe Experts.
Visit Mainframe and see what they have to say about wonderful world of mainframes.
I submitted these on the 24th of August. Ignored as usual.
Yeah, as a matter of fact I bleed Blue!
Are they going to be teaching at a college or university? Or at local schools? That's certainly a big difference in pay grade.
I will teach high school math. You know, all that Stand And Deliver crap. The kids will be a drag :-)
The analysis I have seen did not make such an assumption, though "hours worked" is never easy to measure for salaried workers. Ironically, it is usually the teacher's union that makes such an assumption about everyone else. Most non-teaching professionals put in much more than 40h, but the unions almost always assume it is 40 when making their comparisons. The studies I remember estimated that a teacher works about 80-85% of the total hours per year as compared to other professionals. They work somewhat more than the average hours per week, but work far fewer weeks per year.
Ultimately, though, I think that the pay scales need to be changed. Just about every organization in the country (public and private) except K-12 schools have figured out how to fairly pay their best workers more than their worst. We shouldn't be surprised that when our K-12 schools fail to do this, they can't attract many good workers!
Some possible ideas:
1: Pay teachers more in difficult to teach subjects and schools. Science, math, and special ed are facing severe shortages. Elementary ed, English, and history are facing huge surpluses. This is the result of ignoring economics. Likewise, good, experienced teachers flee the toughest schools where the children have the most need, precisely because the transition is either pay-neutral (in district) or pay-positive (out of district). We need to be attracting good teachers to bad schools with higher pay.
2: Even out the pay scales. The biggest barrier to entry into the profession is the low beginning salary. Evidence indicates that quality of teaching rises rapidly for the first few years and then levels off pretty quickly. There is no reason for huge, back-loaded pay raises, where the people with 25 years are making more than double than those with 5 years, if the results are nearly the same. Instead of ranging from 30k-80k, maybe 40k-60k is more justified (keeping the same average, of course).
3: Reward relevant job experience. This interacts strongly with the previous point. You cannot expect mid-career professionals to switch to the bottom of the pay scale. Their experience is relevant and should not be ignored.
4: Incorporate more measures of quality - student performance, peer review, quality of the teacher's education, etc. Northeastern Kansas State - Southfield ain't Harvard.
Honestly, it seems more like "IBM know how to get good PR".
There are still open questions about their manufacturing safety and pollution practises, they're lobbying hard for sofware patents in EU (as a developer and OSS contributor I have a BIG problem with that), etc.
On the scale, they don't seem to be doing that bad. Just don't forget that they're just doing whatever it currently takes to maximize profit and shareholder returns. Until/unless shareholder lawsuits against companies that try to do the "right thing" even if it impacts the bottom line become a thing of the past, that'll continue to be the way.
It has nothing to do with our goddam "school system". Tech and sci simply does not pay enough to justify what many see as long, difficult courses. There is no stability and relatively flat upward mobility in sci/tech. The big potential bucks are law, finance, and business. The starting salaries may be lower, but the potential is much higher, and often seen as more interesting.
Sci/tech wages have been dragged down by globalism such that they are simply not competitive with biz and law careers. Foreign students gravitate toward sci/tech because it is transferable to their own country and does not require as much English pronounciation ability. Stop blaming the school system, dammit. It is simply supply and demand, and flat-lining careers are not in demand.
Table-ized A.I.
It's not just the dramatically lower salary that's going to discourage competent, well-paid IBM professionals from moving on to become teachers (although a 4x pay cut is kind of dramatic for a job that requires two more years of training to qualify for). It's also the complete lack of respect, the poor work environment, the discipline problems that in some case become physical dangers, students who feel like prisoners and act accordingly, students who've been wrecked by their circumstances and can't reasonably be expected to learn math and science. These are the reasons why we don't have enough math and science teachers in the US in the first place, and trying to draw the newbies in from reasonable employment strikes me as a recipe for failure.
Digital Equipment did this years ago. They even gave employees who got teaching jobs money during the first two years (IIRC) to help them make the adjustment.
Even further than before.
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
It seems to be that even a head of business, schools and universities will be the next ones who are most likely to switch over in a big way to FOSS and Linux. The high cost and low government budgets almost force schools to look at any possible alternatives.
:P ).
IBM can benefit from this by encouraging their exemployee-new-teachers to advocate on behalf of Linux / IBM service contracts to their co-workers and the school board (and of course having them suggest IBM hardware too is just icing on the cake
Write to your school board and tell them to use Linux, even if they don't at least they will have heard of it if someone else menions it to them.
I can't help but wonder why people get all excited about a company beeing selfish.
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
Americans, Canadians, and Western Europeans had almost exclusive access to a modern education. Hence a reasonable explanation for being "world technology leaders" AND only having home-grown folk.
Ah, but now other people in the world are getting access to the same kind of education... and it is not necessarily that we are getting more stupid; there are a lot of people in the world who are bringing themselves up to our level. If businesses employ a representative number of well-educated people throughout the world, then...
It seems everything is just fine. While we have enjoyed a higher position of priviledge, there is nothing inherently special or better about us. Everyone should keep trying to be the best educated, most skilled, etc., but in the end, we will be in the same game as everybody else, and with no unfair advantages, guess what?
Maybe [white] Americans will have to do some of the jobs that we have relegated as third-world or minority-only. And this analogously extends to the other countries currently in priviledged positions, but others can speak to the phobias in their home countries.
Now that's a bummer I'm sure, but priviledge is only sustainable for so long. There is nothing inherent in our genetic, ethnic, cultural, or geographic location that can keep us on top always.
I know that you can point to the positives in your remark (build more schools!) but I'm calling racism. Plain and simple.
You work for the CIA? And even if I did I wouldn't take it personally...
100 people (of highly skilled labor) is hardly a layoff. If you read the articles, you would see that they are looking for people with 10 years experience and advanced degress - hardly the typical crowd targeted for layoffs. The head of the program got 50 calls from volunteers the day the program was announced. IBM's program is transformative and their dedication to education over the last 10 years is commendable.
Digital had a program like this in the early 1990's. Motivation was the same, to encourage employees to leave to reduce costs.
Guys... people...dudes... ;) You really think that such a super global giant like IBM really cares about some shit#y education in US??? Come guys be real!!! It's just one more way to layout people with "benefits"... they pay instead of "layoff package" - one year 70% salary for "leavening to teach" - witch is the same like laying off + retraining former employees for some 25'000$ salary from 100+K$. Come on, guy's be real... they get huge benefits from tax returns from this US layoff scheme...
If it would be Google or GE with such initiative - I wouldn't think anything bad about it .. but IBM.. it's like think that GM or Microsoft or Bell companies doing smth to help regular people...