Lucy Sanders

Lucy Sanders of National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) reports the organization’s research, underscoring the value of encouraging today’s students in pursuing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) careers:

• The current unemployment rate in the U.S. is 7.9%, but for computing-related occupations it’s less than half of that (3.5%)

• The number of African Americans and Latinos employed in computing-related jobs should be double what it is today, given their proportional participation in the US workforce

• Across all STEM careers, tech jobs are growing fastest and have the second-highest starting salaries

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2020, there will be nearly 1.4 million computing-related jobs added to the U.S. workforce.

With the existing pipeline of students, however, we’ll be able to fill only 30% of these jobs with computing graduates.

NCWIT offers the following tools:

• Counselors for Computing (C4C) Pathway Cards help connect students’ interest with next steps toward IT and computing careers. C4C is a project of the NCWIT K-12 Alliance, made possible by the Merck Company Foundation and Google.

• A job-search tool at the NCWIT website, powered by Indeed.com, lets people search for computing-related jobs within NCWIT member organizations — including large companies, startups, universities, and non-profits all around the country.

• Top 10 Ways Successful Technical Women Increase Their Visibility includes ten things that highly successful women say they do in order to increase their visibility throughout the company, industry, and technical community.

-* What “best practices” have you seen to increase professional employment among diverse employees?

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