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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."
This might be a way of busting the anti-science trend that you see in Intelligent Design and various other post-modernist or new-age flakiness. Face it, a country where 60% of the population believes in Satan but only 20% believes in evolution is not going to remain a superpower or technological or scientific leader for much longer. And with the visa restrictions due to the war on terror, IBM has to settle for what they can get in America, which right now, isn't very good pickings.
I'm sorry, but most of the new-age and fundamentalist beliefs out there amount to sloppy thinking. The current plague of fundamentalism is just new-age occultism with a biblical spin. Cat Stevens was a major league acid casualty before he went all Muslim and started rooting for Khomeini against Salman Rushdie--that should give you an idea of the flake factor at play amongst the Born Agains. How much of that do you think a company like IBM can take without it affecting the bottom line? This is a company whose slogan was "Think!", and these people won't.
I'm glad to see IBM is doing something about it. I wonder how long it will be before Bill Gates catches on and wades in with all his money. Somebody's gotta do it, because, unlike England, the U.S. doesn't have a rich colony to pitch in when it reaches senile old age.