Thursday, July 10, 2014

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Industries and Employment Booming in the San Francisco Bay Area: California Community Colleges Organizing to Meet Demand



July 10, 2014

PRESS RELEASE


Contact:  James B. Jones, Executive Director, Mid-Pacific ICT Center (MPICT.org)
Office:  415.239.3600 / Cell:  415.867.6616
E-mail:  jjones@mpict.org


Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Industries and Employment Booming in the San Francisco Bay Area:  California Community Colleges Organizing to Meet Demand

SAN FRANCISCO, California – The Mid-Pacific ICT Center (MPICT) and the San Francisco Bay Center of Excellence today announced final release of the report, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Demand and Supply, Issues and Opportunities in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, which documents exceptional ICT industry and employment performance and growth.  The report also documents exceptional capacity and opportunities to meet ICT industry and employment cluster needs by Bay Area California community colleges.

According to MPICT Executive Director James Jones:  “Information and communication technologies are key drivers of 21st century economic growth and livelihood.  Yet, many of our educational and workforce development systems have not adjusted to meet the phenomenal growth in ICT workforce demand.  Code.org publicizes a shortfall of a million workers in software development between now and 2020.  According to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Computing will represent half of all Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) jobs by 2020 and 62% of STEM job openings between now and then.  We are not even close to meeting that demand.  We have a national crisis in ICT workforce development.  Hopefully, reports like this will help people understand the scope of this crisis and ways we might come together to address it.”

According to the report, ICT industries, which create, market and deliver ICT related goods and services, are among the largest and most important industry clusters in the greater San Francisco Bay region.  Relative to all industries, in 2012, ICT industries accounted for:

                    1 in 11.5 firms
                    more than 1 in 10 jobs
                    about one in five dollars of sales revenue
                    more than one in 4 dollars of taxable earnings
                    almost one in six new jobs between 2012 and 2015.

Not all ICT industry jobs are technical, though, and ICT workforce doesn’t just work for ICT industry employers.  ICT workforce is now strategically important to most organizations, across all industries, because that ICT workforce enables increasing productivity from all workforce and most strategic efforts of all business functions.  ICT Workforce demand in the Bay Area is large and growing.  In 2012, cross-sector ICT workforce in the Bay Area accounted for:

                    about 1 in 12 jobs
                    median annual salaries of about $90,000
                    about 1 in 12 job openings between 2012 and 2015

The report calls for ICT industry support and improved ICT technical workforce development as very high, ongoing economic development priorities in the San Francisco Bay Area.  ICT jobs each create an additional 4.3 jobs through multiplier effects, according to the Bay Area Council.  ICT industries and workforce are major economic development drivers in the 21st century.

The report provides detailed data and findings for the Bay Region, and for five identified Bay Area sub-regions, which should be valuable for economic planners, grant funders and seekers, educators, workforce systems, community based organizations and other stakeholders. 

In addition, the report documents the ICT education and workforce development capacity of the 28 Bay Area community colleges, which offered in 2010/11 related to ICT:

  • 1,350 faculty in 82 programs
  • 140K for-credit and 16K non-credit enrollments
  • 180 academic degrees and 405 certificates
  • More than 7,000 sections of more than 2,000 courses
  • More than 17,000 full-time equivalent students
  • Strong Vendor Neutral and Industry Academy Programs and Certification Preparation
  • Service to all Bay Area geographic areas
  • Affinity to local K-12 and 4-year college and university systems and schools
The report points to ICT related offerings of the 10 Bay Area public universities, nine of which offer 32 ICT related departments, with a variety of bachelor, master, doctoral and research opportunities.

Finally, the report includes many problems, issues and opportunities related to ICT education and workforce development - and suggestions for how diverse stakeholders in the Bay Area might come together to address them.

Download the report free at www.mpict.org/pdf/SF_Bay_ICT_2014.pdf.


Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is an umbrella term, widely used outside the U.S., and in the U.N, to encompass all rapidly emerging, evolving and converging computer, software, networking, telecommunications, Internet, programming, information systems and digital media technologies.  ICT/Digital Media has been adopted as sector nomenclature by the California community college system, California Department of Education Career Technical Education, the California Employment Development Department, and the California workforce system, including the State Workforce Investment Board, the California Workforce Association and all 49 local Workforce Investment Boards.  ICT is a much more effective search term than the more prevalent IT (Information Technology), which, ironically, as an indefinite pronoun and returns at least everything in the English language.

The Mid-Pacific ICT Center (MPICT.org) is funded in part by the National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education program to coordinate, improve and promote ICT education, with an emphasis on 2-year colleges, in California, Nevada, Hawaii and the Pacific Territories. 

California Community Colleges (californiacommunitycolleges.cccco.edu) form the largest system of higher education in the nation, with 72 districts and 112 colleges serving 2.76 million students per year. Community colleges supply workforce and basic skills training and prepare students for transfer to four-year colleges and universities.  One in four community college students in the U.S. attends a California community college.

Centers of Excellence (http://www.coeccc.org), funded in part by the Chancellor’s Office, California Community Colleges, Economic and Workforce Development Program, in partnership with business and industry, deliver regional workforce research customized for community college decision making and resource development.  


California Community College ICT/Digital Media Sector Navigators (ict-dm.net) are focused on developing and delivering regional solutions to ICT education and workforce development needs in every region of California.

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