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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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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. :)
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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.
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.
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?
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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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.
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....
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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.
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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.
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...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.
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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.
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.
Dude What the heck your saying "So we can teach the H1-Bs kids !!!" Just because the uncle sam came up with a new terminology for imigrants who comes to fulfil their american dream there are just good as you folks who can vote and gets paid more, further more unless your a native american some time ago in in the early days your grand dad or his dad came to this country with the same mindset. Just because back then none of this berocracy didn;t exisit doesnt mean people on H1-B is any differnt from them.
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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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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.
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?
IBM's pension plan is not designed this way, at least not for the people who are eligible for this program (10 years or more at IBM). You keep your pension. You are vested after a year.
JoAnn
IBM employee
If you can't take as much stress, I don't think that teaching in a public school is the right move to make.