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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.
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If there's anything America needs, it's more science teachers.
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.
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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.
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.
That's nicer than firing them.
And that's precisely the idea. IBM figures if they "encourage" their most senior and skilled (read: most expensive) employees to go elsewhere, they can downsize without the PR unpleasantness of layoffs. It's the same logic as "early retirement" programs, but rather than buying out a contract you pay someone to go into teaching instead.
Frankly, IBM can have all the good PR they want from this move. Helping your employees to get another job before you fire them is great from a social responsibilty standpoint, and helping them into teaching, a field that always needs *experienced* people in it, is even better. Sure, IBM is doing it for primarily financial reasons but everyone wins in the end, so I'm perfectly fine with that.
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The biggest issue is pay.
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i onSummitOnHighSchools/Oregon.pdf) . My friends got into teaching because they felt a strong call to teach kids, not because they aspired to ride teh hype, take a company public and Profit!!!
Perhaps, but I think it depends on where you are in the US. In Portland, the biggest gripe I have heard from several teacher friends of mine is the fact that the union actively protects bad teachers. By bad, I mean incompetent, uncaring, and sometimes even openly racist or sexist. The whole circumstance is very demoralizing.
The other big issue my teacher friends have is the impressive amount of money devoted to standardized testing and bloated administration in Portland schools. It's not that they're opposed to testing, per se, but they're troubled by the policies that are attached to it, as well as the questionable quality of the NCLB. (see http://petelee.blogspot.com/2005/02/no-child-left
The pay, ironically enough, has never really been that big of a concern. It's not great, but one can live decently in Portland on it (see http://www.all4ed.org/publications/NationalEducat
While I applaud IBM's desire to support education, more needs to be done to change the intrinsic cultural problems in how schools are managed. No sense training new teachers if they're not going to stay: 3 out of the 5 friends of mine who got involved with teaching left because they became disillusioned and demoralized.
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.
According to the all4ed.org site I included above, that is not appear to be the case for high school teachers. And, my anecdotal experience with teachers indicates that they were high achievers in college. It's difficult to find teaching jobs in Portland, even with attrition, so it's almost a requirement to have a Master's degree. Also, after being accepted to Carnegie-Mellon University, a friend of mine shocked his parents by informing them that he planned to become a teacher. Not for the money, but an opportunity to pass a love of math on to future generations.
As an aside, I'd note that most of my instructors at Portland Community College (also not notable for good pay), were frequently Masters-level instructors and Ph.D's with extensive professional (pre-teaching) experience. One excellent Pre-Calculus teacher I had was formerly a mathematician for NASA).
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
I don't know if the government monopoly, per se, is the issue here. On several long trips to Europe, I was impressed with the math, verbal, and political science skills of the majority of people I encountered. I believe that restructuring how schools are managed and changing certain negative cultural contributions teacher's unions have made would be a good start. I agree with your point that schools shouldn't be assembly lines: students aren't "commodities." It may be that very view that's the crux of the problem...
Yes, because offering insane salaries to IT 'professionals' during the dot-com era brought brilliant people to the field by the truck load.
You want good teachers to stay in the profession? Make parents teach their children some manners. There is no way I would ever consider teaching, I wouldn't put up with those brats.
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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
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?
If you can't take as much stress, I don't think that teaching in a public school is the right move to make.