Archive for April, 2007

Archives for Research

The Fortune 500, the granddaddy of all business listings, touts size over innovation, quantity over quality, staggering profits over contributions to society.

Such is life. We’re a “quant” nation – one that celebrates home runs rather than on-base percentage; horsepower over mileage; busty blondes (even if they’re recently deceased) instead of – well, you get the idea.

Job creation is happening across the board in our economy, but in the nation’s 500 largest revenue generating public companies – record profits are fueling expansion plans. Years of employee cutbacks, coupled by infrastructure investment, and process refinements are clearly paying off for shareholders of billion-dollar enterprises.

If you’re job prospecting, the F-500 is a useful list, but you have to know how to navigate it for your purposes. On the other hand, if you just like big companies I hear Wal-Mart (No. 1) is looking for some friendly people.

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Archives for Research

The immigration debate is expected to heat up again with the release this week of an employment report showing that the U.S. engineering workforce is almost fully employed. The data runs contrary to the views of pundits who contend that low-wage-paying countries are eating our lunch in high-tech.

The Cyberstates report released this week by the by the American Electronics Association shows that the national unemployment rate for engineers is under 2 percent. Overall, the high-tech industry added 150,000 jobs in 2006 for a total of 5.8 million in the United States, according to the study, which pulls data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s the highest number of high tech jobs in the country since 2002, and well below the 2000 people of 6.58 million high-tech jobs.

Economist Jared Bernstein with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C, told The San Francisco Chronicle that there is no labor shortage crisis that should drive Congress to raise the caps on H-1B visas granted each year to foreign workers. “The minute you hear somebody shout ‘Labor shortage!’ you don’t pull the H-1B lever.”

One of the most interesting bytes of data produced by the study are the average wags and number of high-tech jobs by state. The differences seem a bit larger than variations in the cost of living. For instance, in California in 2006 the average high-tech wage was $95,424. By contrast, in Florida, it was $61,141; and in North Carolina, it was $69,660.

Cyberstates 2007: A Complete State-by-State Overview of the High-Technology Industry, costs $250 for non-AeA members.

U.S. High-Tech Employment

Source: AeA Cyberstates Report, 2007
Note: Data are rounded.

Archives for Research

Quality of living is a highly subjective area of research. Most of us feel we have a pretty good handle on where to live and the decision typically boils down to family roots and possible employment. No one that I know of has chosen where to live (or to repatriate) based upon the results of a research study.  

Mercer Human Resource Consulting’s 2007 Worldwide Quality of Living Survey, released last week, is used by HR compensation experts to help determine whether expatriates are entitled to hardship compensation. The ranking of 270 cities suggests a clear bias toward mostly white, wealthy enclaves – where the living is good (give or take some harsh winters). Mercer’s top-ranked cities lack what are often euphemistically termed “urban issues.” Though many of these cities have bilingual citizens, or serve as hubs of international commerce, few of these cities are considered multicultural “melting pots.”

Here’s Mercer’s ranking of the top 10 global cities, based upon its Quality of Living metrics:

1. Zurich, Switzerland, Score 108.1
2. Geneva, Switzerland, Score 108.0
3. Vancouver, Canada, Score 107.7
3. Vienna, Austria, Score 107.7
5. Auckland, New Zealand, Score 107.3
5. Dusseldorf, Germany, Score 107.3
7. Frankfurt, Germany, Score 107.1
8. Munich, Germany, Score 106.9
9. Bern, Switzerland, Score 106.5
9. Sydney, Australia, Score 106.5

“Scores are based on the quality and availability of hospital and medical supplies and levels of air pollution and infectious diseases,” explains Mercer. “The efficiency of waste removal and sewage systems, water potability and the presence of harmful animals and insects are also taken into account.” Asian cities such as Delhi, Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai all scored poorly despite  their global stature, emerging affluence and bountiful jobs.

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Archives for Immigration

What if the U.S. government allowed corporations to import global talent without constraints? Quite a few good people would lose their jobs. But somewhere between unrestrained access to global talent and the current annual quota on H-1B visas lies a more beneficial equilibrium.

In just two days last week, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services department was flooded with 133,000 requests for 65,000 H-1B slots. The USCIS cut off the application process – get this – nearly two months faster than it did last year and four months faster than in 2005. What’s going on here?

For those of you unfamiliar with the visa acronyms H-1B and L-1, H-1Bs are a regulated mechanism to enable companies to import talent with “specialty” skills otherwise unavailable in the U.S. L-1s are typically used for managers. You won’t be surprised to hear that the vast majority of H-1B workers come from India and work in high-tech jobs, typically as programmers. The otherwise unavailable standard (my words, not theirs) is somewhat related to location, too. In some instances, these skills exist domestically, but available workers don’t want to move to the employer’s location. It’s a highly imperfect market.

Assuming the applications are in order, the winners are drawn at random. The H-1B workers can stay for up to three years and if an extension is granted, six years is also possible. Employers must pay market wages – yet another point of controversy about the use (or misuse) of these visas. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report last June that found “more than 3,000 applications that were certified even though the wage rate on the application was lower than the prevailing wage for that occupation.”

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Archives for Relocations

Ten years ago, Joy J. Bellefontaine was fresh out of university, looking for adventure and hoping to ease the burden of student loans.

Today, the 35-year-old Canadian is an IT project manager for DHL in Singapore.

Spending her entire professional career abroad, Joy has worked as an embalmer in Japan, earned an MBA in Germany and helped run an IT department in Prague for an international law firm. She exemplifies how someone with an adventurous spirit and enterprising nature can carve out their own long-term expatriate career. 

From Europe to Asia, the trick to traversing cultures, she says, is to be a good guest. “Even though I may live, work and pay taxes in a country, I am still a visitor and I need to respect the culture in which I live,” she says. “Finding the right balance of graceful strength of character and flexibility is an art for an expat. It is something I aspire to achieve.”

After graduating from Carleton University in Ottawa with a degree in political science in 1997, Joy quickly discovered that the available jobs in her field were not to her liking. She had helped cover her university expenses by working as an embalmer and through the connection of a Canadian friend, she landed a job as an expatriate embalmer in Japan.

“I thought it would probably beat an office job in Ottawa,” she recalled.

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