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Job picture brighter for class of 2005
Carol Schroeder, University Career Center
Training
students for shifting workplace
computer science department
Leadership
Shelton Leadership Forum
NCSU-Meredith
alliance to bestow engineering degrees
college of engineering, dual program
Coalition
Announces 1st Annual List of the Triangle Region's Best Workplaces
for Commuters
Triangle Region's Best Workplaces for Commuters
ABB
opens corporate research center near Cleveland
research and development projects
UGA
official named distinguished alumna
Jenny Penney Oliver, College of Education distinguished alumna
Job picture brighter for class of 2005
Nov. 16, 2004
Associated Press; News & Observer
By JUSTIN POPE
© Copyright 2004
BOSTON -- The recovering economy and looming retirement of the baby boomers are making this a very good year to be a college senior looking for a job after graduation. Recruiters, career counselors and students say the fall recruiting season has been the most active since the dot-com boom.
Accountants, after the wave of post-Enron regulations, are again finding increased demand for their services, but theirs is just one of several hot fields. Technology companies, investment banks and consulting firms appear to be picking up the pace, as do some defense contractors.
In the Triangle, college career counselors report strong interest among employers in construction, environmental sciences, health sciences and biotech.
"I think employers are less tentative about their hiring plans," said Carol Schroeder, director of the University Career Center at N.C. State University. "They've known for several years that they couldn't stop recruiting on the college campuses. But before, everybody was holding back and waiting to see what the business climate would be like. Now, companies are definitely hiring."
College hiring is expected to increase 13 percent over last year, according to a new survey from National Association of Colleges and Employers.
Four in five employers called the job market for new grads good, very good or excellent; last year fewer than two in five did.
Michigan State University's College Employment Research Institute will release a report Thursday that director Phil Gardner said will show overall campus hiring is up as much as 20 percent this year, depending on the region.
Marcia Harris, director for university career services at UNC-Chapel Hill, said there had been a 20 percent increase in the number of companies on campus this fall.
"Finally we're really seeing a turnaround," she said. "We're seeing consulting firms return, investment banks, even some technology firms. Whereas in the last couple of years, employers weren't necessarily replacing people who left or were retired. Now they are building a pool of new hires again."
Experts say hiring still isn't approaching the intensity of the late 1990s. A population boom among college students has tightened competition, and employers remain gun-shy about big bonuses.
Some engineers are still having a tough time, in part because so much manufacturing has moved out of the country. And many businesses, notably financial services, learned to get by with leaner staffs during the downturn.
At the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., interviews are up roughly 30 percent and the school had to step in, requiring recruiters to allow students to mull job offers until at least Nov. 24. For the first time since the dot-com boom, competition was fierce enough that companies were pushing students for immediate decisions on their offers.
Experts say companies are hiring to handle new work but also making up for years of conservatism -- and anticipating an exodus of retiring baby boomers.
"We've seen employers that have cut back the last few years looking around the office saying, 'We've got this new work. Who's going to do the job?"' said Lee Svete, Notre Dame's director of career services.
Accounting remains strong. PriceWaterhouseCoopers plans to hire about 3,100 people off U.S. college campuses this year, up almost 19 percent from last year. Ernst & Young plans to increase hiring about 30 percent this year and bring on 4,000 new college grads.
Jim Case, director of the career center at Cal State-Fullerton, says regional and local accounting firms are hiring, too.
Finance and nursing skills are also in demand, and job hunters willing to move have a big advantage. Computer science jobs are also returning after the tech slump, said Carol Lyons, dean of the career services department at Boston's Northeastern University, though other fields, like journalism, are still tough.
But even liberal arts majors need not despair, said Wayne Wallace, director of the career resource center at the University of Florida.
" 'Any major' is the No. 1 demand," he said. "We have plenty of employers that say if you are a college grad and want to ... learn our business, we will take you from that point on."
MORE HIRING
A survey found that employers expect to increase their college hiring, particularly
in engineering and computer science. They also expect to increase starting
salaries for bachelor's degree graduates.
Those planning to increase starting salaries
(NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLLEGES AND EMPLOYEES)
The Associated Press
Top 10 bachelor's level degrees in demand, according to employers
1. Accounting
2. Electrical engineering
3. Mechanical engineering
4. Business administration, management
5. Economics, finance
6. Computer science
7. Computer engineering
8. Marketing, marketing management
9. Chemical engineering
10. Information sciences and systems
(Staff writer Karin Rives contributed to this report.)
Nov. 16, 2004
Durham Herald-Sun
By ANNE KRISHNAN
© Copyright 2004
CHAPEL HILL -- UNC business professor James Johnson tells students that the three keys to success in the swiftly evolving global economy are speed, speed and more speed.
"The rate of change is going to be so rapid and so dramatic that you're going to have to constantly be re-educating and pushing the envelope to hone your own skills," Johnson said.
The American higher education system also must adapt to the increasingly global economy to ensure students have the skills they need to be competitive not just on graduation day, but years down the road, he says.
"We have to re-engineer the way we do education and we have to make education more entrepreneurial," said Johnson, who teaches at UNC's Kenan-Flagler School of Business. "We need to train people who are capable of being free agents."
Firms aren't committed to hiring employees for the long term, he said. Instead, they increasingly prefer to contract with workers as needed -- be it in the United States or abroad.
And about 11 percent of all U.S. jobs are at risk of offshoring, Johnson said, citing a study conducted by California's Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics. The authors concluded that high-tech areas such as Silicon Valley and the Triangle were most vulnerable to losing jobs to offshoring.
China and other Asian countries are producing a massive number of scientists and engineers who shouldn't be taken lightly, said Warren Fuson, who worked in business development for Nortel Networks in China before retiring in 2002. He's now executive director of TechAction, a Raleigh nonprofit.
"These are smart people -- they're not dummies," he said. "This is not Third World stuff."
Universities therefore must teach students to innovate and take risks -- not just in business but in the social sciences and public sector, Johnson said.
He touts UNC's $10 million Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative as exactly the kind of change he hopes to see. The new program, based in the College of Arts and Sciences, is aimed at encouraging academic, social and business entrepreneurship across the university's campus.
Starting next year, the university will offer research opportunities, first-year seminars and an undergraduate minor in entrepreneurship. The initiative also will train faculty in business creation, sponsor a business plan competition and launch a program to help start growth-oriented businesses.
Across the Triangle, N.C. State University's computer science department continues to introduce new classes in teamwork, communication, leadership and innovation, said Alan Tharp, a professor and the former department chairman.
NCSU students aren't affected much by the low-level IT job losses, but the university still wants to make its graduates as marketable as possible, he said. One of his colleagues calls Wolfpack computer scientists "software paratroopers."
"You can drop them anywhere in a company and they'll be a success," Tharp said. "It's not just technical skills that our students are highly qualified at, but other skills they have that separate them from students around the country and the world."
In the future, computer science will be more of an applied discipline, he said, as workers integrate IT into fields like microbiology and aerospace engineering or use it to create solutions to pressing needs.
So starting next fall, a course on innovation will require students to apply computer science to a practical issue. The course will be open to students in other disciplines, as well.
"In order to continue to create jobs in this country, we must continue to be innovative," Tharp said. "It's not guaranteed they'll be innovative, but if at least they're aware of it, it will be a competitive advantage."
Duke University's computer science department is reviewing its curriculum, but not specifically because of offshoring, said Owen Astrachan, the department's co-director of undergraduate studies.
Duke instead has undertaken the review to see how it can reverse the department's dramatic decline in enrollment over the past couple of years. The decline, which NCSU has also seen, could be the result of instability in the technology job market, Astrachan and Tharp said.
Even as enrollment in computer science departments drops, the U.S. Labor Department predicts that the United States will need 1.5 million more information technology professionals by 2006, said IBM spokesman John Lucy. Meanwhile, existing IT workers may not have the proper skills to fill the current and future openings, he said.
Technology companies do want to create jobs in the United States if the skilled labor is available to fill them, he said, citing a 1,200-person expansion IBM has planned for the Washington, D.C., area. The positions will pay an average salary of $90,000.
"There's a downturn now in the economy, and we're going to lose our innovation advantage if we don't do anything about it," Lucy said.
IBM announced in October that it would be partnering with Duke, UNC, NCSU and N.C. A&T University to help better prepare students for future information technology jobs. The company will work with universities to tailor a curriculum that makes computer science graduates "relevant," he said.
"We want to prepare students earlier in their careers with the right skills so ... those jobs don't have to go to countries that are investing more in education," Lucy said.
Nov. 16, 2004
News and Observer
By Joyce Sykes
© Copyright 2004
The Gen. Hugh Shelton Leadership Forum "Practical Applications for Exemplary Leadership" will take place from 8:45 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday at N.C. State's Jane S. McKimmon Center at Gorman Street and Western Boulevard in Raleigh. Attendance fee is $159. Pre-registration is preferred, although there will be an opportunity to register on-site the day of the event. Call 515-2261 or visit www.ncsu.edu/sheltonleadership.
NCSU-Meredith alliance to bestow engineering degrees
Nov. 12, 2004
Triangle Business Journal
By Jane Paige
© Copyright 2004
For a copy of this article, contact News Services at 515-3470.
Tweaking tree genes on horizon
Nov. 15, 2004
Checkbiotech.org, Switzerland
By CATHERINE CLABBY
© Copyright 2004
After creating worm-resistant corn and glow-in-the-dark fish, it was only a matter of time before genetic tinkerers unveiled their next big thing.
Look up. Now they're talking trees, especially in the Triangle.
Science is poised to insert foreign genes into conifers and other trees harvested for cash.
Opposition already is stirring. The prospect raises ecological and cultural issues unlike any encountered before.
But the promise is big, too, said Claire Williams, a geneticist and visiting professor at Duke University. Designer trees may grow faster and yield products cheaper. That could preserve existing forests while the world's appetite for wood and paper keeps growing.
Supporters and skeptics, she said, need to talk. "We have a narrow window for constructive dialogue. In five or 10 years it will be too late," Williams said.
This week, she and the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke will host a gathering of scientists, lumber industry people, environmentalists and regulators to do just that. The two-day forum at Duke, funded by the National Science Foundation, will be closed to the media so that people can chat freely.
Also this week, the Institute of Forest Biotechnology will host a conference called "New Century, New Trees" in Research Triangle Park. It also wants to generate straight and informed talk about a field soon moving from the research stage to the planting stage.
Change is sprouting
So far, genetically altered trees are found in only a few places outside corporate or university research plots. Chinese foresters raise altered poplars resistant to bugs. And Hawaiian farmers tend papaya trees that have been made immune to a ringspot virus by a gene imported from that virus.
But change could be coming fast to states with sizable lumber-product industries, including North Carolina. In coming years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which reviews and permits genetically modified organisms, is expected to see more applications to test and then grow modified trees.
Geneticists at N.C. State University already have made experimental aspens that produce less lignin, the cellular substance that makes trees rigid and takes polluting chemicals and a lot of effort to break down in pulp mills.
In South Carolina, ArborGen, a research company launched by International Paper and MeadWestvaco Corp., wants to market genetically altered trees by the end of this decade.
"An increasing number of field trials will be very visible in the next three years," predicts W. Steven Burke, a vice president at the N.C. Biotechnology Center and a board member at the forest institute.
Plantations filled with engineered trees could follow.
Burke expects that people outside the forestry and lumber fields will be watching closely, because trees are so precious in aesthetic and in functional ways.
"Trees are requisite for life on this planet," he said. "We can survive without corn. We cannot survive without trees."
Worries of wide effects
Re-engineered trees would differ significantly from modified crops such as corn and soybeans, Williams said.
Trees are perennials that can live more than 100 years. They also produce large amounts of pollen that could carry altered genes for miles, making it more likely to affect nature's genetic profile.
That worries Alyx Perry, director of the Southern Forests Network, who will attend Williams' meeting. She sees possible environmental threats to natural forests and economic threats to private landowners raising timber on those forests.
"These are clearly brilliant people," Perry said of the scientists leading the charge into this new field. "But we have a real concern with ultimately how this technology is going to affect the land."
Some scientists advocate creating modified trees that are sterile, so their pollen can't mix with other trees. Similar strategies are under consideration to control the spread of altered genes from other re-engineered crops.
But some environmentalists question whether this planet needs sterile trees.
Extremists in this debate have previously resorted to sabotage. In 2001, vandals damaged most of the genetically altered trees grown at a University of Oregon program. That same year, an office building at the University of Washington was firebombed. It housed a geneticist who was developing a fast-growing poplar.
Dawn Parks, a spokeswoman for ArborGen, said her company hopes the Duke conference will help people with a stake in the debate sort substantive issues from those without merit.
"We want to determine which are real and which don't need to be addressed," she said.
Speaking face to face, Williams said, can only help. "I sympathize with all the different groups. It was time to talk," she said.
Coalition Announces 1st Annual List of the Triangle Region's Best Workplaces for Commuters
Nov. 16, 2004
Onlypunjab.com, India; Business Wire; Yahoo! Finance
By staff report
© Copyright 2004
Today, the Triangle Region's Best Workplaces for Commuters(SM) Coalition,
a group of business, health, transportation, human resource, and planning organizations,
released the first annual list of the Triangle Region's Best Workplaces for
Commuters(SM). The list recognizes leading employers committed to reducing
traffic congestion and air pollution and improving the health and quality of
life for thousands of commuters in the Triangle Region. The coalition will
announce the list during a celebration with Triangle businesses and government
leaders at the Exploris Museum in downtown Raleigh.
Twenty-four Triangle employers representing more than 70,000 employees qualified
for the inaugural list of the Triangle Region's Best Workplaces for Commuters(SM),
up from 11 employers that initially qualified in April. Qualifying employers
provide outstanding commuter benefits that are intended to reduce the number
of employees that drive alone to work.
With support from SmartCommute@RTP, the Triangle Transit Authority, and the Triangle J Council of Governments, the U.S. EPA was excited to see the list more than double in four months and expects continued growth in the future. Because this will be an annual list, new employers that qualify will be included on the 2005 list.
"Air quality is a major concern in the Triangle Region, and we think it's important to be part of the solution," said Gayle Lanier, vice president, Nortel Networks Global Corporate Operations. "By providing a flexible work environment and offering commuter benefits such as telework opportunities, we're encouraging many employees to switch from drive-alone commuting to options that help relieve traffic, air pollution, and stress."
Employers designated as one of the Triangle Region's Best Workplaces for Commuters(SM) include IBM Corporation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, BASF Corporation, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, the North Carolina Department of Transportation, and NC State University. For a complete list of the Triangle Region's Best Workplaces for Commuters(SM) visit www.trianglebwc.org.
According to Deborah Bryan, president and CEO of the American Lung Association of North Carolina, "More than three in 10 children in North Carolina suffer symptoms of lung disease, the leading killer of infants and children. Six million children in the United States suffer from asthma: more than 500,000 live here in North Carolina. It is the leading cause of school and work absenteeism due to a chronic illness. The past two decades have yielded a 55 percent increase in deaths due to asthma -- and with North Carolina having three of the top 25 worst areas in the United States for ozone, we need to do all that we can to clear the air."
To qualify as one of the Best Workplaces for Commuters(SM), organizations must provide:
-- At least one primary commuter benefit, which can include a monthly transit/vanpool pass subsidy, cash in lieu of free parking, or a significant telework program.
-- At least three supporting commuter benefits, such as carpool/vanpool incentives, lockers/showers for bikers or walkers, incentives for living near work, or onsite amenities such as day care or dry cleaning.
-- A central point of contact for information, who actively informs employees of available commuter benefits.
-- Access to a regional or employer-provided Emergency/Guaranteed Ride Home program.
About the Best Workplaces for Commuters(SM)
The Best Workplaces for Commuters(SM) list recognizes employers that are leaders in offering superior commuter benefits, such as subsidized transit passes, vanpool subsidies, or telework programs, to their employees. Like the list of FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For, employers are recognized for their excellence and leadership. It's a win-win for everyone: employers earn prestige from being recognized as one of the best; employees enjoy more options in balancing their personal and work life; and communities benefit from reduced traffic congestion and cleaner air. For more details and to see if an organization qualifies, visit www.bwc.gov.
About the Triangle Region's Best Workplaces for Commuters(SM) Coalition
The Triangle Region's Best Workplaces for Commuters(SM) Coalition is comprised of leading government and business organizations in North Carolina's Triangle region working to reduce traffic congestion, improve air quality, and make commuting less stressful and costly. Members include the American Lung Association of North Carolina, N.C. Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce, Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro Metropolitan Planning Organization, Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce, Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce, Greater Triangle Regional Council, North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, North Carolina Department of Transportation, Raleigh-Wake Human Resource Management Association, Regional Transportation Alliance, Research Triangle Foundation, SmartCommute@RTP, Triangle J Council of Governments, Triangle Society for Human Resource Management, Triangle Transit Authority, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
ABB opens corporate research center near Cleveland
Nov. 16, 2004
Control Engineering
By Jim Montague
© Copyright 2004
Wickliffe, OH—To focus on innovations in automation and partnerships with area universities for improving industrial production and cutting energy consumption, ABB Inc. is formally opening its new Corporate Research Center (CRC) in early November at its industrial computer control system facility near Cleveland. CRC will concentrate on advanced computer process control and robotics to improve the efficiency and capability of industrial plants and electric utilities.
ABB reports that it’s invested approximately $25 million in its CRC operations in Wickliffe, Raleigh, NC, and Windsor, CT. These centers perform research and development projects with universities, including Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Stanford University, North Carolina State University, and others. Power development work is conducted at the Raleigh location, while robotics is done at the Windsor site.
ABB maintains a worldwide network of CRCs that work with research universities. The new Wickliffe location was selected partially because of its proximity to U.S. universities pursuing projects related to ABB's product lines, which include robots, process control systems, industrial process measurement devices, and advanced software programs to monitor and control plant and mill operations. The Wickliffe CRC is also near ABB-based assembly sites. Besides the industrial computer control system facility in Wickliffe, ABB also has a robotics assembly operation in Michigan, and an instrumentation assembly operation in Pennsylvania, among its other manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and Canada.
UGA official named distinguished alumna
Nov. 15, 2004
Athens Banner-Herald, GA
By staff report
© Copyright 2004
Jenny Penney Oliver, director of academic initiatives in the University of Georgia College of Education has been named 2004 distinguished alumna at North Carolina State University's College of Education.
Oliver is co-director of the Partnership for Community Learning Centers Initiative, a collaborative effort between UGA, Clarke County Schools and the Athens-Clarke County government to raise student achievement.
She is also director of the Dean's Council on Diversity and a member of the board of directors of the National Association for Multicultural Education, serving as co-chairwoman for the 2005 national conference in Atlanta.