Author: Mark Jr.

P resident Barack Obama has tried to model himself after Abraham Lincoln. When it comes to the federal workforce, a more apt comparison may be John F. Kennedy.

    Obama hasn’t exhorted Americans to ask themselves what they can do for their country. But early indications are that he has inspired them to consider working for their country.

    The administration, however, faces the same recruiting, retention and development challenges that have bedeviled its predecessors in managing the huge federal bureaucracy, which totaled 1.9 million executive branch employees in 2008.

    The government must solve turnover problems among young employees, fill gaps in the midcareer ranks and find a way to hold on to workers who are nearing retirement, according to experts. It also has to make applying for a civil service job less onerous.

    Initially, it looks as if the “hope” and “change” themes of the Obama campaign are carrying over to governance.

    “He’s already on his way to making government cool again,” says Max Stier, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group promoting effective government.

    As of Inauguration Day, about 400,000 applications had been submitted for administration political appointments through the Web site Change.gov. Those positions number about 7,000 across federal agencies. The site was shut down after Obama was sworn in, and visitors were referred to the jobs section of www.white house.gov, which is still under construction but will presumably connect to the Office of Presidential Personnel when it is completed.

    For those interested in civil service jobs, Change.gov provided a link to USA jobs.com, the official site for federal government employment. In early January, about 2.8 million people were visiting each week, up about 500,000 per week from the summer, according to Stier.

    “This is a new era of hands-on government and more active government, and Obama is bringing a lot more people into it,” says John Hamre, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

    Although the jobs section of Change.gov was just a one-page information form, Stier says it was useful in channeling the enthusiasm for administration jobs.

“He’s already on his way to making government cool again.” —Max Stier, Partnership for Public Service

    “It does appear to me, from the bleacher seats, they have been effective in providing a single portal that is easy to use and informative, which is an accomplishment,” Stier says.

    But given the Internet savvy of the Obama campaign, which reached out to some 10 million people, some observers expected Change.gov to garner more than a few hundred thousand applications.

    “I would characterize that as low volume,” says Linda Brooks Rix, co-CEO of Avue, a human capital management software company in Washington. “I would have expected that number to be in the seven figures.”

    One of the problems with Change.gov, according to Rix, was that it didn’t identify specific openings. Avue’s transitionjobs.us site offers an online version of the “Plum Book,” which lists federal jobs that are filled by political appointment.

    Another Change.gov shortcoming was that it was more of an aggregator of résumés than a device for identifying talent. Most of those decisions will be made the old-fashioned way—through connections and personal references.

    “I don’t think it will have much value as a selecting tool,” says Scott Cameron, director of global public sector at consulting firm Grant Thornton in Alexandria, Virginia.

Difficult to apply
    For fired-up job seekers, indicating interest in a federal job, either online or by contacting an administration official, is only the beginning of a long process that could include filling out many forms and answering dozens of questions.

    Similar challenges exist in applying for other federal jobs. Although the Office of Personnel Management launched an initiative to significantly reduce the lag between receiving a résumé and making a job offer, the process can still take several months.

    “It’s a nightmare to apply for a federal civil service job,” Cameron says. “If any American company recruited people … the same way the federal government does, then that company would be out of business very soon.”

    Recruiting is just one of many deficiencies in federal workforce management.

“You have this massive capital outlay that you can’t see, you can’t track and you can’t manage.” —Linda Brooks Rix, Avue

    “Our government’s current system for recruiting, hiring, compensating, training and managing people is broken in too many places,” states a recent report by Grant Thornton and the Partnership for Public Service.

    The report is based on interviews with chief human capital officers throughout the government. “As a result, federal agencies struggle to bring in top talent, often don’t fully utilize the skills of current civil servants, or simply lack enough of the right talent.”

‘A crisis of competence’
    Experts say recent government missteps ranging from the botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to more recent crises like approving tainted toys from China and failing to detect a $50 billion financial Ponzi scheme can be traced back to personnel failures.

    With the government being called on to bail out financial markets and pull the country out of a recession, the demands on civil service are sure to grow. But the enthusiasm generated by Obama’s ascension to the White House is concentrated mostly among young people just starting their careers.

    The real strain in the federal workforce is in the more experienced ranks. Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense, says the government “lacks effective ways to bring people in midgrade.”

    He says too many people drop off “the conveyor belt” as they move from the low levels at which they were hired to more senior jobs. Part of the problem is that the government has provided only cost-of-living adjustments rather than real raises for nearly two decades.

    The result is that top civil service performers have departed for the private sector. Many senior managers who have stayed on board are within a few years of retirement.

    “I believe we have a crisis of competence in the government,” Hamre says. “We have not brought in talent in systematic ways for the past 15 years. Government is seriously enfeebled precisely at a time when we need a stronger, more capable and sophisticated government.”

    As in-house talent shrinks, the government has increasingly turned to outside firms to perform services. From 1999 to 2005, the number of federal contractors grew by more than 50 percent to 10.5 million, according to the Congressional Research Service. Critics say that the George W. Bush administration contributed to the trend with its emphasis on privatization.

    The shift has inherent drawbacks, Rix says. Contractors are hired through the procurement office of an agency, sometimes causing a disconnect with the HR department.

    “You have this massive capital outlay that you can’t see, you can’t track and you can’t manage,” Rix says. “You have a system that is not agile … and [is] ripe for corruption.”

    Avue is encouraging the Obama administration to “insource” more federal work by hiring civil service employees. “We don’t have enough expertise in-house to provide oversight of government contractors,” Rix says.

 A talent pipeline
    If the government starts to rely more on its own workforce, it should put more emphasis on talent management, says Maria Grant, federal human-capital practice leader at Deloitte in Washington.

    For instance, the government has a shortage of Food and Drug Administration inspectors. It needs to think through the skills required for the position and work with colleges to produce graduates who are qualified and inspired for the work.

    The objective is to go beyond simply filling openings.

    “We must have much more robust leadership development programs and succession planning,” Grant says. “I’m hoping that the new administration takes a more holistic view and develops a comprehensive workforce planning strategy.”

    But the first order of business is to make it easier for everyone who has renewed enthusiasm about government work to apply for federal jobs.

    “If [Obama] can do that, he will make a major contribution that will extend far beyond his four or eight years in office,” says Grant Thornton’s Cameron.

When President ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers union in 1981, it accelerated the decline of collective bargaining. Today, only 7 percent of private-sector workers and 12 percent in the overall economy are organized.

    For the last generation, many HR departments haven’t had to pay much attention to labor relations. The situation may change drastically if the Employee Free Choice Act becomes law—a prospect that improved dramatically with the victory of President-elect Barack Obama and increased Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill.

    The bill would allow a collective bargaining unit to form if a majority of employees sign cards authorizing one. It is the top priority for organized labor, which spent tens of millions of dollars on grass-roots campaigning to put Obama and Democrats in office.

    Under current law, companies can insist on a
secret-ballot election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. Other provisions of the bill would send first contract negotiations to binding arbitration within 120 days if an agreement is not reached and substantially raise fines for companies trying to impede union campaigns.

    Even if the bill doesn’t pass as originally written, observers expect that Obama will sign some form of it. For instance, the card-check requirement might be dropped in favor of a provision mandating union elections within a few days of a petition being filed.

    The pressure is on HR departments to get up to speed on union organizing. “Corporations are about to face a shortage of people who have experience in this area of human resources,” says Stan Wilson, managing partner of Elarbee Thompson in Atlanta.

    Snap union elections will force employers to conduct education campaigns at a moment’s notice. In an NLRB election, they have several weeks to do so. HR will have to explain pay and benefits more often and keep its finger on the pulse of job satisfaction.

    “Employers are going to have to be prepared to talk to employees all the time,” says Leslie Silverman, a former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission member who is now a partner at Proskauer Rose in Washington. “They’re going to have to be great communicators.”

    Companies may also seek help on collective bargaining and union relations by turning to outside counsel.

    “Employment law firms are gearing up their labor law practices for the advent of the Employee Free Choice Act,” says Dave Riewald, a partner at Bullard, Smith, Jernstedt Wilson in Portland, Oregon. “It will mean a tremendous amount of work.”

    Riewald is president of Worklaw Network, an organization that tries to address the need. It’s a collection of boutique labor and employment law firms with 350 attorneys in 37 offices across 27 states.

    The breadth of the group positions it to help employers respond to a spike in union organizing. Worklaw firms emphasize their intimate knowledge of their legal jurisdictions.

    In labor and employment law, “You need to know the local decision makers,” Riewald says.

    In a few months, HR professionals will have to know how to get help quickly when unions come calling.

Workforce Management, January 19, 2009, p. 21 — Subscribe Now!

Barack Obama did not get around to appointing a labor secretary until most of the rest of the Cabinet had been tapped. But after his inauguration January 20, workplace law could zoom along on a much faster track.

    In one of his final Cabinet nominations, Obama named Rep. Hilda Solis, D-California, to head the Department of Labor. She doesn’t have a long record on employment policy, but she will by the time she is done working with Congress on a legislative slate featuring bills that would make it easier for workers to form unions and sue for pay discrimination as well as guarantee them paid sick days—the Employee Free Choice Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Healthy Families Act, respectively.

    Those bills will form the foundation of what one observer calls the most intense Capitol Hill activity on HR issues in a generation.

    Like thousands of other HR professionals across the country, Sally Savoia, vice president for HR at Praxair in Danbury, Connecticut, is warily watching Washington.

    Although the bills could be amended, they are likely to significantly increase HR administrative duties such as record keeping and auditing—sapping resources that could otherwise be devoted to strategic areas including talent management.

    “It’s less time available to be the business partner,” Savoia says.

    Obama and congressional Democrats have vowed to pull more Americans into the middle class. They will attempt to accomplish the goal in part through a lengthy workplace policy agenda that relies on strong government enforcement and employee empowerment. Solis, 51, plans to crack down on wage and hour violations as well as pay discrimination.

    The approach will force many HR professionals to concentrate on ensuring their companies are in compliance with new laws and tougher oversight from the Department of Labor.

    A raft of bills, all of them introduced in the last Congress but stopped at various points in the legislative process, have gained momentum with increased Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill. The House approved the Ledbetter bill and a companion measure on January 9.

    The biggest obstacle to Democratic aspirations, a presidential veto, will be removed once Obama is in the White House. He promoted many of the ideas during his campaign. They are now “teed up for one of the most active congressional cycles for HR public policy issues in the last 30 years,” says Michael Aitken, director of government relations for the Society for Human Resource Management.

Strain on HR
    Savoia says most of the workplace agenda is well-meaning but poorly conceived. It could force her HR department of 150 to operate differently. About 35 percent of her staff work in payroll and benefits administration. The other 65 percent are HR generalists.

    One of the areas she likes generalists to focus on is training. Now they may get caught up navigating a sea change in employment and labor law for Praxair, which manufactures industrial gases and coatings, has a worldwide employment of 28,000 and posted $9.4 billion in sales in 2007.

    “They will spend less time on the workforce development side of their jobs because they are going to spend more time on making certain the organization follows the [new] rules,” Savoia says.

    She may have to hire more administrative staff and invest in new IT data collection systems that will enable the company to track absences more precisely than it can now under a mostly honor system, Savoia says. In the midst of a recession, the changes could eat into her department’s fixed budget.

    “I don’t think the current staffing levels will allow human resources departments to be both strategic and administrative in nature if more than a few of these labor laws are passed,” says Stan Wilson, managing partner of Elarbee Thompson in Atlanta.

    HR will have to adjust because the legislative agenda gives employees more leverage. The changes will dramatically increase a company’s liability exposure, according to Gerald L. Maatman Jr., a partner at Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago.

    “Employers should immediately audit their existing employment policies, compensation schemes, safety initiatives, workplace demographics, subcontractor arrangements, workplace dispute resolution mechanisms and union avoidance measures, as well as invest considerably more time and energy to the administration of human resources generally,” Maatman wrote in a November 24 report.

    As it tries to keep up with the transformation, the challenge for HR is to cast compliance as strategy. HR professionals will have to demonstrate to executives that keeping the company in line with changing laws is central to risk management.

    They can’t be perceived as “just crossing t’s and dotting i’s,” says former SHRM chief executive Susan Meisinger.

    She draws an analogy to the finance department. It is charged with filing corporate taxes. But that administrative function and other duties it performs can be broadly defined as providing financial stability. HR administration is similar, Meisinger says.

    “Do it as part of your risk-management responsibility,” Meisinger says. “But don’t let it define you as a profession. It can’t be perceived in the organization as all you do.”

    In explaining compliance requirements to the C-suite, HR leaders should not just send a memo on the details of the new workplace rules. They should emphasize that they’re helping the company avoid lawsuits.

    “It’s a matter of vocabulary and how you articulate what you’re about to your colleagues,” Meisinger says. “The language of risk and liability is much better understood by other executives.”

    There will be plenty of both contained in the proposals that Congress will take up over the next few months.

Card-check measure
    The Employee Free Choice Act would allow a union to form when a majority of workers have signed cards authorizing a collective bargaining unit. Under current law, a company can demand a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board.

    This bill has the highest profile on the workplace agenda. It is the No. 1 priority for unions, whose share of the
private-sector workforce has dwindled to 7 percent.

    Organized labor is thrilled that Solis, a co-sponsor of the bill during her congressional tenure, will be an ally from her perch as labor secretary. The AFL-CIO gives her voting record a rating of 97 percent. Business groups are vigorously opposing the measure and urging Obama not to push it forward as companies are struggling to cope with the recession.

    Opponents say the bill will drive up business costs. Supporters assert that collective bargaining is the best way for workers to increase their wages and benefits.

    “It’s not a coincidence that the widening income gap in the United States of America tracks the decline in union density,” says former Rep. David Bonior, D-Michigan and chairman of American Rights at Work as well as an Obama economic advisor.

    Greater employee participation in unions will benefit business, Bonior argues, because it will give workers bigger paychecks and more spending power to buy cars, refrigerators and houses. It also will produce workforce management gains.

    Harley-Davidson, Kaiser Permanente and AT&T are companies that have allowed card-check elections. “They have cooperative working relationships with their unions,” Bonior says. “That relationship results in a more productive workplace.”

    Savoia, however, disputes that notion. Praxair is partially organized already.

    “We operate well with our unions,” she says.

    But Savoia is concerned that strengthening the union movement will lead to work rule changes that hamper her ability to design jobs and move people to new positions based on demand.

    “There is a significant impact on productivity in the workforce,” Savoia says. “There’s just less flexibility.”

Sick leave
    A bill being criticized for limiting company latitude on benefits is the Healthy Families Act, a measure that would mandate seven paid sick days each year. Much of the consternation comes from companies that have paid-time-off programs in place. It’s not clear how the bill would affect PTO days.

    Praxair has a more traditional system of separate vacation days and sick days. But Savoia has misgivings because the bill does not define “day” or sick time.

    A bigger headache is that the bill would prohibit companies from changing their benefits plans once the measure becomes law. Policymakers want to prohibit firms from cutting existing programs in order to make room for the seven sick days.

    “To say you can never change your plan going forward is a handcuff on us that we don’t want,” says Mike Spicci, director of global benefits at Praxair.

Pay discrimination
    Keeping tabs of who is taking sick days is only one of the record-keeping challenges posed by the bills. A pay discrimination measure would require a potentially exponential increase in the preservation of compensation-decision trails.

    The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would overturn a 2007 Supreme Court ruling. In its controversial 5-4 decision, the court held that pay discrimination suits must be filed within 180 days of the original discriminatory action. Under the Ledbetter bill, each paycheck that has been diminished by discrimination would restart the statute of limitations, leaving companies vulnerable to suits for decades. Critics say it would alter the parameters of all discrimination cases, not just those involving pay.

    Companies would conceivably have to justify each pay decision over an employee’s entire tenure.

    “You’re going to have to get a vault for all the records you’ll have to keep,” Meisinger says.

    Obama came out strongly in favor of the Ledbetter bill during his campaign. It was a highlight of several forums on women’s issues hosted by future first lady Michelle Obama.

    For Obama, the Ledbetter bill is a matter of fairness. “Lilly Ledbetter’s problem was not that she was somehow unqualified or unprepared for higher-paying jobs,” then-Sen. Obama said during a campaign rally. “Her problem was that her employer paid her less than men who were doing the exact same work.”

    Savoia doesn’t dispute the underlying thrust of the bill—equal pay for women. But she would like parameters on filing a suit.

    “Is this something I can live with as an HR professional?” Savoia says. “It is if you put in a time limit. It’s legislation with good intentions but bad thinking around it. I’ll be forced into a settlement. It will always cost me money.”

    HR has responded to major new laws in the past and will do so again, says Don Lindner, manager of practice leadership for WorldatWork, an organization that specializes in benefits policy.

    When pension laws were first passed in 1974 and the Family and Medical Leave Act became law in 1993, they posed enormous administrative challenges.

    “There were opportunities for HR people to step up and be noticed,” Lindner says. “They added to their reputations—and value to their organizations.”

    Lindner adds that HR must maintain a positive attitude about sorting out the new laws. “You sit back and say, ‘How can we leverage this to our advantage?’ ”

Workforce Management, January 19, 2009, p. 1, 18-22 — Subscribe Now!

Each time executives at IBM India have a meeting, the discussion quickly turns to the development of its burgeoning staff.

“The third sentence is always [about] training,” says David Tai, IBM’s director of HR Learning for India/South Asia.

Tai leads the effort to integrate new hires into IBM’s rapidly expanding operations, which are headquartered in Bangalore and include five other sites around the country where the company provides technology services and conducts research.

In 2002, IBM India employed 4,900 people. It added about 20,000 employees in 2007, reaching a total of 73,000—making it the second biggest IBM location in the world, after the U.S.

“It’s something that has never happened before, this hypergrowth,” Tai says. “It’s a multifaceted challenge.”

To find job candidates, IBM looks at a wide range of Indian higher education institutions—from first tier to third tier. It casts its net widely in a country that has “400 million talents” younger than 21, Tai says.

IBM works with colleges to identify candidates before they graduate. That outreach, combined with IBM’s reputation as a place to grow, helps keep the pipeline full.

“They’re very motivated to be productive,” Tai says. “In India, learning and career are the two things they want.”

Even though new hires have passed an English exam and other aptitude tests, they’re not necessarily ready to hit the ground running from day one.

“Once they are in, we use a very rigorous methodology to develop their skills,” Tai says.

The IBM India training department has grown from a staff of three in 2004 to 60 in 2008. Globally, IBM spends $600 million annually on training.

One of the first objectives in India is to change a cultural mind-set that values hierarchy. New employees tend to wait and see what the boss does rather than take the initiative.

“Once they understand they are the center of gravity, they can come up with projects; they can drive things,” Tai says.

Empowerment also extends to career development. During the first three days of orientation, employees are introduced to IBM’s business units and how they work together on a global scale.

They become familiar with Blue Pages, an intranet listing of all employees, their skills and their projects. In their first 30 days, they also meet one of the company’s Royal Blue Ambassadors—IBM staffers who help new colleagues assimilate. In addition, they can access an internal wiki that promotes peer-to-peer learning.

For long-term guidance, employees can turn to a Blue Knight, an IBM manager who has been certified in helping others understand IBM career paths. There’s also a corporate internal Web page called Blue Dawn that lists all technical professions at IBM.

The point of these efforts is to reinforce the notion that IBM is a “globally integrated enterprise,” in the company’s words.

“The key thing is to identify where the talents are and mobilize the talents for the customer,” Tai says.

That kind of flexibility means that an employee who joins IBM as a Java programmer or as an Oracle or SAP specialist can move into IT architecture design or nanotechnology.

The fluidity increases employee engagement. “They like to stay in IBM because they get to work on several professions versus just one job,” Tai says.

Fostering that connection may help IBM stand out among other employers in India. Since the economic liberalization of 1991, workers, armed with education, have more control over their destinies and tend to look out for themselves.

“There is no loyalty to the company they’re working for,” says Mahashweta Nandi, a consultant in the Bangalore office of Ma Foi, an international placement company.

The door swings both ways. “The company doesn’t think much about the employees,” Nandi says. “Companies have more choices.”

But the churn may be subsiding. The U.S. economic downturn could result in a 20 percent to 30 percent reduction in hiring by Indian IT companies, says Anil Kumar, a Ma Foi director.

“Nevertheless there will be continued demand for talent in telecom and IT infrastructure, network security [and] software architecture,” Kumar says.

IBM India doesn’t seem to have taken significant hits in the slowdown. In the most recent quarter, IBM revenue in emerging countries grew by 21 percent.

The rapid hiring pace—estimated at one new employee every 14 minutes last year—is likely to continue, keeping the demand high for training.

“We have to change from a car engine to a jet engine,” Tai says.

When David Perdue was chairman and CEO of Dollar General Corp., the company couldn’t satisfy the high demand for new locations.

One of the reasons was a lack of qualified employees to staff the discount retailer. “It limited to some degree the rate at which we built our own stores,” Perdue says.

Perdue now chairs the National Commission on Adult Literacy, which is urging Congress to significantly expand funding for workforce education and training programs and overhaul the way they’re administered.

The plan, outlined in a June 2008 report, “Reach Higher, America,” calls for $20 billion in annual funding for the workforce system by 2020. The goal is to use that investment to train 20 million people each year, up from the current 3 million.

Such a dramatic increase will require a political commitment similar to that seen in support of the GI Bill and for sending a manned space flight to the moon.

Commission officials say that the spending is more than justified by the need to upgrade U.S. work skills.

Cheryl King, the study director, says that 88 million of the 150 million people in the American workforce have at least one educational or language barrier that limits their job prospects. For instance, 18 million lack a high school education.

Even the 51 million people who have a high school diploma often fall short of the qualifications necessary to land work that provides a higher quality of life.

“The jobs that are going to be in demand over the next decade that pay living wages require [an] educational background beyond high school,” says King, who is president of Kentucky Wesleyan College.

The Workforce Alliance, a Washington organization that promotes funding for training, says that 45 percent of all jobs by 2014 will be in the “middle-skill” range, meaning they require more than a high school education but less than a four-year college degree.

The group praised the literacy commission report for highlighting that millions of Americans lack the educational background required for those jobs.

“This report helps us advance a case, an economic argument, for why workforce development matters and why we need to invest to build a skilled workforce,” says Rachel Gragg, federal policy director at the Workforce Alliance.

To achieve that goal, the commission is recommending substantial reform to the Workforce Investment Act, the federal training law, and better coordination between the disparate entities that participate in workforce development and adult education, like state agencies and community colleges.

“We’re calling for a significant redesign of federal and state funds earmarked for adult education and workforce training,” King says. “We’re asking Congress to take a fresh look at this.”

When that will happen is unclear. Congress has not updated the Workforce Investment Act since it was enacted in 1998. As a consequence, problems with the workforce system have not been fixed, critics say.

But a bill to reauthorize the law has stalled and is not likely to be placed on the congressional calendar before the end of the year. That means that Congress, as it has for several years, will again fail to make reforms. A number of logistical and policy disputes have stymied progress.

Gragg says her organization would support any effort to get the Workforce Investment Act moving again. “I don’t have the sense that those dynamics have changed,” she says.

Meanwhile, targeted workforce readiness measures have been introduced. They include a proposal by Reps. Rahm Emanuel, D-Illinois, and Jim Ramstad, R-Minnesota, to establish employer-matched portable education and training accounts. Another bill, written by Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, would provide specialized training grants for regional emerging industries.

Reps. Ruben Hinojosa, D-Texas, and Patrick Kennedy, D-Rhode Island, are working on legislation that incorporates some of the literacy commission report’s recommendations. For instance, it would put a greater emphasis in the Workforce Investment Act on postsecondary education and job training; allow incumbent workers to access those programs; revise state funding formulas to reflect demographics; and increase the use of technology in skills training and education.

Focusing on a different workforce development area, the Financial Services Forum, a group of 20 CEOs of financial companies, recently recommended a $5 billion annual increase in education and training benefits for workers who lose their jobs because of international competition.

These efforts notwithstanding, a breakthrough on training policy this year in Congress is unlikely.

While Washington drags its feet, states are trying to tackle workforce challenges on their own. In Indiana, 931,000 working adults have an educational deficiency that limits their employability, according to a study by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. They lack some kind of required credential—a high school, associate’s or bachelor’s degree—for jobs in demand.

The key to addressing that problem is to help people transition to higher skill levels, according to Mark Lawrance, senior vice president of the Indiana chamber.

But that process is undermined by the disparate nature of training initiatives. Federal and state programs for workforce development and adult basic education “tend to operate in silos,” Lawrance says.

The chamber is helping Indiana businesses cut through the clutter with Ready Indiana, a concierge service that points them toward national, state and community training options to upgrade their employees’ skills.

Lawrance says the state is poised to make progress in integrating training efforts because state government and business are working together.

“In Indiana, we have all the key parties at the table,” Lawrance says.

A national focus on workforce development is possible, according to Perdue, the literacy commissioner’s chairman. It’s happening in India, and Perdue, who has been working to launch a retail business there, has seen it firsthand. The Indian government prioritizes elevating labor-market skills, he says.

“They’re really very serious about it,” he says. That attitude increases the urgency for improving workforce development in the U.S.

“We’re getting left behind because we have so many kids who are not getting the minimal level of education and training,” Perdue says.

Anand Sharma was a panelist at a National Bar Association meeting a couple years ago, discussing ways to increase the number of African-American lawyers practicing patent law.

    During his flight from Detroit back home to Washington, the intellectual property lawyer came up with an idea on how to help achieve the goal.

    Sharma, a partner at Finnegan Henderson Farabow Garrett & Dunner in Washington, began thinking about his own background. He was born in Guyana to parents of Indian descent.

    His father received a scholarship to Howard University, a historically black college in Washington. He also had aunts and uncles who graduated from Howard. His firm is located only a few miles from the campus.

    Sharma persuaded Finnegan Henderson to work with Howard to establish an introductory patent course at the school’s College of Engineering. Sharma, Finnegan’s diversity chair, and a colleague, Malcolm Meeks, teach the class on a voluntary basis.

    “We’re exposing the engineers at Howard to patent law,” Sharma says.

    He hopes to persuade many of them to complement their scientific expertise with a law degree to defend technological advances from theft by competitors.

    The recent BlackBerry lawsuit, which threatened to shut down the system, is an example of the fierce competition involving new ideas, Sharma says.

    Companies are seeking more intellectual property help, making it one of the hottest legal fields. “There’s a war out there for talent,” Sharma says.

    He and his firm want to ensure that minorities are a significant part of the candidate mix. In addition to the Howard course, Finnegan Henderson also sponsors a patents and technology seminar at Howard each spring.

    This year’s event, held in early April, featured lawyers from Wachovia, FedEx, Scientific Atlanta and AT&T. They spoke to about 50 students, some of whom asked thought-provoking questions about how to protect a breakthrough.

Diversity in the legal profession will take time. “If there were an immediate, quick solution, you would see it in place already.” —Anand Sharam, partner, Finnegan Henderson Farabow Garrett & Dunner

    Such curiosity should serve them well. “As we move toward a knowledge-based economy, you’re all going to touch IP (intellectual property) at some point,” Meeks says.

    Fostering more diverse points of view in an area that is central to U.S. and global growth will benefit businesses, according to the Howard panelists. Having more backgrounds at the table strengthens legal solutions.

    “Diversity is key to a culture of creativity,” says Bert Jennings III, executive director of intellectual property and corporate development at AT&T. “Everyone is going to look at a problem through their own lens, and that lens is their experience.”

    Another argument for diversity is that companies must appeal to an array of consumer races and ethnicities in domestic and global markets.

    “Our customer base is becoming more diverse,” says Carmen Adams, senior vice president and assistant general counsel for Wachovia. “People feel comfortable when they look across the table and see someone who looks like them.”

    But making all law firms as diverse as Finnegan Henderson, where women or minorities serve as directors in nine of 12 departments, will take time.

    “If there were an immediate, quick solution, you would see it in place already,” Sharma says.

Workforce Management, July 14, 2008, p. 36 — Subscribe Now!

It’s not just corporate clients pressuring law firms to increase the diversity of their staffs. It’s also the law students whom they will hire as associates one day—or maybe not be able to hire if they fail to diversify.

    In January 2007, a group of students at Stanford Law School launched an organization called Building a Better Legal Profession. They were inspired to establish the organization after they failed to find a resource that would give them diversity rankings for law firms in New York City.

    So they took it upon themselves to develop diversity statistics and construct their own database. What they discovered shocked them: One-third of the firms in New York had no Hispanic partner and nearly one-third did not have an African-American partner.

    After the group publicized its findings in October, it received more than 10,000 visitors to its Web site—and the numbers keep rising. It also received a burst of media coverage after an event in Washington at the National Press Club.

    The popularity of its work demonstrates the emphasis that young people put on diversity, according to one of the organization’s founders.

    “This is important to my generation,” says Andrew Bruck, a Stanford law graduate who is now clerking for the chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. “I’ve grown up with friends who are black, Hispanic, gay and lesbian, and I expect that [diversity] from my employer.”

    Each spring, law firms hire students like Bruck for their summer associate programs. It’s the pool of talent they cull to make offers for permanent employment.

“This is important to my generation. I’ve grown up with friends who are black, Hispanic, gay and lesbian, and I expect that [diversity] from my employer.” —Andrew Bruck, Stanford law graduate

    That creates an opportunity for students to use their market power to change the way law firms recruit and retain minorities, according to Bruck. If his organization shows a firm lacks minority leadership, it could reduce the number of students willing to accept summer positions there.

    “Firms don’t want to be known as the place that doesn’t have any black partners,” Bruck says.

    The students are trying to get companies to join them in their effort. They sent a letter to Fortune 500 companies in January highlighting the law firm diversity ranking, hoping that they would take the results into account when deciding which firms to hire.

    Andrew Canter, a Stanford law graduate and co-founder of the group, says many companies have implemented their own diversity goals and policies. They need to push law firms, though, to make a difference more widely in the legal profession.

    “Corporations spend a lot of time on [diversity] internally but have less frequently chosen to use market power with outside counsel,” says Canter, a fellow at the Mississippi Center for Justice.

    If that situation continues, the students will be missing a key ally in their diversity push, which may be stalling as large law firm clients demand cost cutting more than increases in minority partners.

    “I’m seeing a sense of stagnation,” Canter says. “We’re hearing that diversity is a third- or fourth-level priority.”

    The issue will have to rise on the to-do list, or law firms will miss their chance to hire future attorneys like Bruck and Canter.

Workforce Management, July 14, 2008, p. 34 — Subscribe Now!

After more than 20 years as a Society for Human Resource Management executive, Sue Meisinger has plenty of annual conference anecdotes from which to draw her most memorable moments.

    What stands out for her, though, is not a specific speaker, dinner or session. Instead it’s the atmosphere created when about 15,000 HR professionals gather.

    For a function that is often characterized by silence surrounding sensitive office matters like personnel moves and salary determinations, the annual conference provides a demilitarized zone where its practitioners can speak freely and know that that they’re not alone on the HR front lines.

    “The high point has always been the sense of community when you walk into conference,” says Meisinger, 55, who is retiring at the end of June following six years as the organization’s president and CEO. “There’s an energy to it that I just love.”

    Meisinger’s role at the conference has evolved as she has moved from being a vice president to COO to CEO.

    As SHRM’s chief executive, she’s in constant motion. Going from event to event means traversing hallways full of friends from her career at SHRM and in the government. Her assistant is always at her side, keeping her on schedule and not letting her linger too long.

    “I’ll stop and catch up until the cows come home,” Meisinger says.

    Her peripatetic approach has both drawbacks and benefits. It can be physically draining. But getting out and about also provides opportunities for rewarding interaction.

    “It is not good for my feet, but it’s great for my spirit,” Meisinger says.

    She also has gotten a charge out of meeting the keynote speakers for the opening sessions. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who appeared at the 2006 conference in Washington, stands out.

    Powell combined a confident military air with a down-to-earth personality. “He made sure he shook hands with everyone behind the stage—all the crew, all the staff,” Meisinger says.

    Another keynoter, Bill Cosby, spoke at the San Diego conference in 2005 on Father’s Day. When Meisinger was talking with her dad, the comedian walked over, asked for the cell phone and began chatting with him.

    “For my father, who was in his 80s, that was great,” Meisinger says.

    Meisinger’s impact on the conference goes beyond meeting and greeting. She has added elements that help make a huge conference a little smaller by creating more networking opportunities for first-time attendees and more educational events for HR executives.

    The first Masters Series session more than a decade ago drew about 2,000 people. Standing in the room, Meisinger says she felt that “we nailed this one. This was a direction that was welcome and effective for our members.”

    Meisinger will have “mixed emotions” while in Chicago for her last annual conference as SHRM chief executive. “It’s been a great run,” she says.

    At future shows, she says she will “probably have more fun because I’ll be able to chat and catch up” with friends. She’ll still have to do a lot of walking.

Each day that Congress fails to act on reforming immigration policy, employers at both ends of the talent spectrum say they are suffering.

    Political tension surrounding the issue has spiked following the collapse last year of a broad Senate bill that would have strengthened border security and workplace enforcement while creating a path toward citizenship for the approximately 12 million undocumented workers currently in the country.

    Not only is a complete overhaul of immigration law a remote possibility this year, but prospects are dim for narrow legislation that addresses specific needs for both high-skill and low-skill workers.

    On April 8, the government announced that the 65,000 cap had been exceeded on H-1B visas, which allow foreign nationals with the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree or higher to work in the country for seven years. In addition, the 20,000 ceiling on visas for people with advanced degrees also was reached.

    In the last fiscal year, companies sent in 123,000 applications for the 65,000 H-1B visas. For fiscal year 2009, which begins in October, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service received 163,000 applications between the April 1 deadline and April 7. On April 14, it conducted a lottery to determine which firms would receive H-1B visas.

    As a way to ease the pain for employers, especially in the high-tech sector, where employers say they desperately need foreign talent, the Department of Homeland Security issued a preliminary regulation that extends the time that foreign graduates in science, technology, engineering or mathematics can work for a U.S. company on a student visa.

    The agency increased from 12 to 29 months the Optional Practical Training Program, giving students more time to wait for an H-1B visa. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates called for such a reform in congressional testimony in March, arguing that hiring and retaining foreign-national graduates of U.S. universities is critical to helping technology companies innovate.

    The expansion of the training program “is a good first step,” says Robert Hoffman, vice president of government and public affairs for Oracle and co-chair of Compete America, a coalition of technology companies.

    “The administration has clearly recognized through this action that there is a severe skills shortage in the economy,” Hoffman says.

    There are 140,000 openings at S&P 500 companies for engineers, scientists and other highly skilled professionals, according to Hoffman.

    Smaller companies also have openings that they say they can’t fill. Erica Denninger, human resources manager at ATMI, a Danbury, Connecticut, technology firm, says that she can’t find enough computer programmers who are fluent in the Oracle programming language, which runs the company‘s customer ordering and product control systems.

    Even after posting job ads extensively in newspapers and on the Internet, Denninger says she comes up empty. “The candidate pool does not exist,” she says.

    She can find an ample supply of U.S. network engineers to work on the company’s servers and technology infrastructure. But for programmers, she turns to H-1B visa holders who transfer to ATMI from other companies. She depends on a Web-based product from Visanow, an immigration processing company, to navigate the process. “It’s very complex,” she says.

    H-1B critics, however, contend that companies don’t have to go through all that trouble, because there are plenty of U.S. applicants available. Opponents say that the H-1B program displaces U.S. workers and depresses wages. They also assert that technology companies are looking for niche skills rather than hiring qualified Americans and then training them in the specialties the companies need.

    Expanding the hiring program for recent foreign-national graduates is stoking their ire. “It’s completely unnecessary,” says John Miano, a Summit, New Jersey, lawyer and computer consultant who founded the Programmers Guild. “Student visas are not supposed to be the gateway to immigration, but they’re being transformed into that.”

    Miano also anticipates a court challenge to the training initiative enhancement. “I’m curious what authority [DHS] has to do that.”

    But H-1B proponents argue that the move alone will not be enough to shore up the talent deficit. They say that Congress must increase the number of H-1B and permanent work visas, or green cards. Bills to do so are mired in a political stalemate on immigration reform.

    If Congress doesn’t act, “you’re going to create one heck of a bottleneck,” says Hoffman, Oracle’s VP of government and public affairs. “You’re going to find that many more highly skilled individuals are forced to leave the country.” In which case, Oracle will establish operations in countries that will accept foreign-national workers, he says.

    U.S. industries that depend on low-skill labor don’t have as much flexibility to roll with the immigration punches. Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., R-Louisiana, says construction firms and rice, sugar and shellfish producers are hurting.

    “They can’t find the workforce,” Boustany said at a Capitol Hill press conference. “They depended on H-2B visas over the years to meet these needs. This is good policy that’s being held hostage by politics.”

    Boustany introduced a “discharge petition” in early April that would send directly to the House floor a bill written by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Michigan, that would almost double the number of workers who can enter the country on temporary H-2B visas.

    The 66,000 limit for H-2B visas was hit in early January. Last year, a total of 120,000 workers entered the country because those returning to their jobs didn’t count against the 66,000 cap. That provision expired this year.

    Stupak’s bill would restore the returning-worker rule. It has 146 bipartisan co-sponsors but has been stalled by tensions surrounding immigration policy.

    Stupak won’t sign Boustany’s petition. “My discussions with House leadership continue and I remain hopeful that they will lead to the quick action needed for seasonal businesses in northern Michigan and across the country,” Stupak said in a statement.

    Vacation regions of the country are also feeling the pinch. Resorts in the Florida panhandle can’t fill jobs without the young Europeans they usually bring over on summer contracts, according to Rebecca Wolever, COO of Signature Worldwide, a training company.

    “There aren’t enough American teenagers or 20-somethings to fill those service jobs,” she says.

    This is forcing hotels to try new approaches on recruiting and retention. For instance, some have partnered with ski resorts to swap staff during their respective off-seasons.

    “They’re having to get real creative,” Wolever says. “It’s all about retaining and training the staff they have.”

    Some foreign workers who have come to the U.S. on H-2B visas, however, contend that the program exploits them by luring them here on false promises of good jobs.

    In a meeting with about 80 congressional staff in early April, a group of such workers said that employers have H-2B workers under their thumbs because the visas are for a short duration—only about six to 10 months. During that time, the workers have no freedom to leave a bad employer, live under constant threat of deportation and lack access to lawyers, they said.

    The workers say they have been subject to overcrowded living conditions, low-quality food and verbal abuse.

    “The H-2B visa as it is structured now is an instrument to create servitude and modern-day slavery,” said Daniel Castellanos, a Peruvian H-2B worker and a leader of the Alliance for Guest Worker Dignity.

    The workers could have an ally in Rep. George Miller, D-California and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. Miller has introduced a bill that would increase the transparency of H-2B jobs, make employers jointly liable for the actions of recruiters and impose heavy fines for misconduct.

    Miller’s H-2B skepticism is an obstacle to raising the H-2B program caps. He is a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, which means that his stance likely will influence how Pelosi schedules House time for the issue.

    It’s one more example of the complicated Capitol Hill politics that may prevent not only substantial but also targeted immigration reform this year.

Just as Congress was entering the final stages of wrestling with government funding bills in November, the Society for Human Resource Management was holding its leadership conference in Washington.

    The timing was propitious for SHRM’s lobbying operation, which was in the midst of a battle to remove language from several appropriations measures that would require all federal contractors to use the government’s electronic employment verification system.

    The system, formerly known as Basic Pilot but now renamed E-Verify, has drawn strong criticism from the business community. SHRM asserts that it is inefficient, ineffective and prone to error.

    About 24,000 employers use it voluntarily. The rider in the appropriations bills would have mandated that 200,000 federal contractors sign up. SHRM says that such an enlargement could severely disrupt the U.S. labor market because so many people would be declared ineligible to work.

    For now, SHRM has halted such an expansion. Leading a coalition of HR groups, the organization was able to jettison the E-Verify riders from the appropriations bills.

    Members of Congress “realized the shortcomings” of E-Verify, says Mike Aitken, SHRM director of government affairs. “There was a feeling that it wasn’t ready for prime time yet.”

    The sentiment was fostered in part by SHRM’s lobbying efforts. During its November leadership conference, it took 207 members to Capitol Hill to talk to House members, senators and their staffs.

    “We were able to raise awareness about employer verification,” says William Maroni, SHRM chief external affairs officer.

    The message they got across is that verification policy should be considered more carefully, not tacked onto other bills.

    “There was a lot of receptivity to not legislating through appropriations,” Aitken said.

    The skirmish over E-Verify demonstrates that Congress hasn’t given up on immigration reform even though the failure of a Senate bill last spring likely squelched the possibility of a broad measure that encompasses both sanctions and a path toward citizenship for illegal workers.

    But Republicans and conservative Democrats, many of whom were in the vanguard of the Democratic takeover of Congress, are enamored of a crackdown on illegal employment.

    A bill that was introduced in November 2007 by Rep. Heath Shuler, D-North Carolina, has attracted more than 100 bipartisan co-sponsors and requires that employers sign up for E-Verify.

    SHRM will stay engaged in the debate, urging Congress to develop a better verification system rather than just reauthorize E-Verify when the law establishing it expires in November 2008.

    “Our members really are the experts at what works and what doesn’t work,” Maroni says.

Workforce Management, February 4, 2008, p. 22 — Subscribe Now!