The tech executives who have been decrying the Trump administration’s slowing of foreign worker visas are missing the real point: They need to rethink their entire approach to hiring and training before they worry about H-1B visa program.

That’s according to one information technology staffing expert who thinks the furor masks much bigger issues than the H-1B visa program, which gives employers the ability to hire and retain overseas workers in certain skilled jobs for up to six years.

It has been a favorite tool of IT services firms, in particular, to compensate for shortages of domestic workers with skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM. The U.S. will be short 1.1 million STEM workers by 2024, according to the American Action Forum.

The future of H-1B has been in question ever since President Trump signed the “Buy American, Hire American” Executive Order last April. Earlier this month, reports circulated that the government planned to overturn or severely restrict the ability of visa holders to acquire permanent resident status. That created the prospect that some 750,000 Indian workers, many of them in IT-related positions, could be forced to return home when their visas expire.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services last week said it isn’t considering “a regulatory change that would force H-1B visa holders to leave the U.S.” And even if changes are implemented, employers can still request extensions in one-year increments under the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act, the agency said. But despite the reassurances, Quartz reported, bureaucratic obstacles are slowing the processing of H-1B applications.

STEM the bleeding

All that masks a bigger issue, however: The United States’ base of STEM is in serious need of an upgrade, according to David Foote (below), co-founder and chief analyst at Foote Partners LLC, a research firm that specializes in IT staffing trends. Pointing to recent Bureau of Labor Statistics research, Foote called the perception of a shortage of STEM skills produced by academic institutions a myth.

The status of the H-1B program will have “little to no effect on the staffing strategies that companies need to put in place in order to remain competitive,” said Foote, whose firm surveys more than 3,000 employers quarterly to determine trends in staffing, certification and compensation. Its recent research has delivered what Foote called “urgent and potentially catastrophic” problems with tech skills management that H-1B isn’t going to move the needle on fixing, he said.

The jobs that H-1B visa holders have are “not the jobs that companies are struggling to fill,” he said. Many of the jobs where we see the greatest demand are the ones companies have to grow internally. Two examples he cited are jobs in blockchain and in the “internet of things,” which he said will “propel a revolution at a deep core business process level” once initial kinks ironed out. Both technologies are only effective when combined with others.

Photo: Foote Partners

A self-described contrarian, Foote said tech employers are passing off blame for the perceived skill shortage to the education sector when employers are the ones who are best-equipped to address the problem. For example, cybersecurity skills are “learned on the job, not in academia,” he said. “Employers have to train to fill those gaps.” By some estimates, the U.S. could face a shortage of more than 1 million cybersecurity professionals by 2020.

Foote said the popular perception that H-1B visa holders from overseas are filling jobs that employers can’t fill domestically is misguided. “There is no shortage of STEM workers coming out of U.S. universities,” he said. “There is a shortage of multidimensional tech-related workers with the unusual combination of hard and soft skills, but that shortage is not being filled by H-1Bs.”

Organizations need to start by thinking about skills definition as an architectural exercise rather than a set of discrete competencies, Foote said. Future IT projects will integrate multiple technologies, such as blockchain, IoT and analytics.

That will demand a new approach to hiring that considers such factors as job design, skills integration, incentives, on-the-job training and work/life balance. Only by getting rid of standardized job titles and focusing on ways to optimize the abilities of individual employees can organizations reduce turnover and meet the demands of rapidly changing technology, he said.

“Many companies tell us that 40 percent of their tech workforce is contractors and they’re trying to reduce that to 10 percent,” Foote said. “The work is too important not to bring in-house. They know that if they don’t do this, they are going to lose market share and become an acquisition target.”

Image: CristianFerronato/Pixabay