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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."
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!
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?
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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Part of my cricicism on the school system is their treatment of very smart and highly experienced professionals as "novices". I'd rather have a 68yr old IBM TJ Watson vet with a PhD teaching a class than some 22yr old floozy with a 2yr associate's degree in "education".
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
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 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?
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.
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.
Schoolteachers with real-world work experience are very valuable.
But often they find they cannot stand the goofy beurocracy and internal politics of school systems. You can't just fix problems, you have to go thru the channels and kiss up to the right people.
Table-ized A.I.
That stuff is too technical for us, and besides, even today you can get a lot more money laying tiles or installing roofs than you will for designing computer chips with a PhD in engineering. How exactly do you propose to convince kids they should go into that kind of career?
Uh, because it's fun and enjoyable? Not everything is about making the big bucks, you know. Lots of people choose a career based on their interests, not earnings.
Stay within the law, make lots of money, have fun: pick any two.