Nurturing Tomorrow's IT Employees

Solution providers say that much of the current technical talent shortage can be blamed on our education system. Simply put, young job applicants fall far short in the technical knowledge necessary to solve real-world business problems.

And solution providers say this new generation—who are used to e-mail and IM— don't have the face-to-face skills necessary to communicate technology to businesspeople.

But a consortium of Pierce County, Wash., business and education leaders, including Darrell Bowman, CEO of Tacoma-based integrator AppTech, is working to change that. Called the Pierce County Careers Connection, the group's mission is to build up the IT workforce capital in the Puget Sound area.

Bowman is the chairman of the skills panel, and part of the effort to get people interested in a technology career is a technical skills competition. On Feb. 3, the consortium will hold its competition at the Tacoma Technical College.

"The competition includes Web design, hardware maintenance and repair, and networking design, installation and troubleshooting," he said.

In the Web design competition, for example, students have to go through an RFP process with a panel of industry professionals.

"They have to sit through an RFP conference and be able to understand the business requirements and to ask the customer questions," he said. "The students then have nine days to come up with a solution, and most knock your socks off."

In addition to the competition, the event includes keynotes by industry representatives and a job fair designed to teach students more about IT companies and about future employment and higher-education possibilities in the area.

"Most of the competitors walk away with an [employment] opportunity," Bowman said.

He hopes that the consortium will contribute to a better-trained IT workforce able to sell business solutions and not just products.

"I recently hired [a top] sales guy from Zones.com who had interned with me before going to Zones," he said. "But he couldn't sell anything in three months because he went from selling products to selling a service. He didn't know hot to build a solution for a customer. That skill is not being taught anywhere."

But Bowman hopes that the Pierce County Careers Connection can start to reverse that trend in the Tacoma area.

"Too many people get burned by salespeople who don't know how to solve problems," he said.