IEEE-USA President's Column

 

 
President's Column
January 2005

Fostering Relationships, Finding Solutions

Greetings to all. It is a great honor for me to have the opportunity to serve you as 2005 IEEE-USA president. I am pleased that we have a dedicated group of volunteers serving on the IEEE-USA Board of Directors, its Operating Committee, and the 20-plus committees under the four IEEE-USA vice presidents, as well as a talented and dedicated staff to carry out our programs. We hope to implement some outstanding programs this year.

Over the past several years, we have witnessed worldwide workforce shifts due to the pressures of globalization. Technical workforce issues, offshoring and guest worker visa abuses remain difficult problems. We seek a balance between the need of U.S. workers and engineers to preserve their jobs, and the need of industry to access the talent pool necessary to sustain economic growth. We seek fair treatment for H-1B visa holders, while also seeking to prevent employer abuses of the H-1B and L-1 programs.

We plan to gather major stakeholders from government, industry and academia, and technical workers to look at innovation and offshoring in an effort to discover equitable solutions that satisfy the needs of all parties. Such solutions could include increased R&D to maintain the U.S. technological lead, and incentives for companies that reinvest in their U.S. operations and workforce.

A recent Boeing Co. paper, “Ensuring Workforce Skills of the Future: The Birth to Work Pipeline,” perhaps best summarized the challenge offshoring presents to the United States: “As globalization drives businesses to create relationships that take advantage of human and capital resources without respect to borders, how will individual nations ensure their economic stability, national defense, and standard of living for their own citizens?”

We hope our innovation and offshoring forum can help to answer this question. To ensure the forum’s success, I have appointed a steering committee that has already begun to develop plans and make contacts with key members of Congress.

I want to promote a stronger relationship between IEEE-USA and the IEEE Regions and Sections outside the United States. For more than 30 years, IEEE-USA has developed programs to serve the professional needs of the IEEE’s U.S. members. These programs are numerous and include services such as salary surveys, job search programs, career activities and educational and training programs, as well as programs to promote and support legislation for the benefit of society. Many of these services are generic to engineering communities everywhere in the world. Last year we initiated efforts to share our professional activities know-how with the IEEE worldwide. I intend to continue this outreach in 2005 in the hope that all IEEE members will benefit.

The IEEE Sections Congress will bring IEEE delegates from all over the world to Tampa, Fla., in October. We are working with Sections Congress planners on sessions and speakers in which delegates can discover parts of our programs they can model and adopt.

At the first IEEE-USA Operating Committee meeting this month, we plan to refine our high-priority activities for the year, including updating our strategic plan to align it with the IEEE’s strategic goals.

IEEE-USA will continue to be your voice in Washington on career and technology policy issues, lobbying Congress to protect U.S. innovation and cyber-security, and providing federal lawmakers and Cabinet departments with advice and guidance. We will also continue our Congressional Advocacy Recruitment Effort (CARE) to facilitate your communication with your state representatives and those on Capitol Hill.

To learn more about what IEEE-USA is doing for you, please visit our Web site (www.ieeeusa.org), and don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with me at galphonse1@comcast.net.

Updated:  15 May 2007
Contact: Pender M. McCarter, p.mccarter@ieee.org