A federally funded program that enables local companies to import skilled high-tech workers for temporary jobs is paving the way to train home-grown workers to fill those jobs.
Ameet Bakshi, above, of Hackensack recently completed a computer operations program at NJIT. Hart Singh, left, teaches a cloud computing class at the Newark school.
As a result, the New Jersey Institute of Technology and its partners will begin offering continuing education courses on information technology this spring in northern New Jersey, including Bergen and Passaic counties.
The courses will include instruction on how to develop Android and iPhone software applications to become a certified “cloud master” on new technology that enables companies to remotely store and retrieve data.
The classes will be funded through a $5 million grant awarded this year by the U.S. Department of Labor through its H1-B Technical Skills Training Program.
The grant is part of a larger national program that awarded more than $83 million to 43 public-private partnerships in 28 states.
Here’s how it works: Let’s say a company in New Jersey has a job for a computer systems analyst but has been unable to find someone with the right skills and knowledge.
If that company can prove to the Department of Labor that the job would otherwise go unfilled, it can ask the federal government for permission to fill the opening with someone from overseas. The New Jersey company has to pay thousands of dollars in fees to the Department of Labor for the right to bring that employee to the United States through the technical skills program.
Those fees are how the Department of Labor is funding the program, which is educating a domestic workforce with the training needed so employers will not have to look overseas for skilled workers.
Workers who train in the program have to come to it with some expertise. They are required to have “a theoretical and practical application of a body of specialized knowledge” and a bachelor’s degree or equivalent.
Leading role for NJIT
New Jersey ranked fourth in the number of H1-B certified positions in fiscal 2010 with 33,958 or about 6.7 percent of the national total. Most of those jobs were in information technology.
NJIT is the single largest grant recipient in the mid-Atlantic region. The Newark-based school will partner with community colleges and six high-tech employers to train workers and help find jobs for them.
“They’re saying they have open jobs and can fill them with Americans,” NJIT Associate Vice President Gale Tenen Spak said. “But we can’t find people to fill these jobs that are Americans. But if they know a little bit more, we could hire them.”
Among the companies taking part in the training program are IBM in Paramus and Franklin Lakes, AT&T in Paramus, Crestron Electronics in Rockleigh and Intel in Pompton Lakes, she said.
Crestron Electronics began in its founder’s garage and now employs 2,500 people globally, including 1,900 in the United States, said Martin Devaney, the company’s senior director of human resources. The company manufactures software programs that integrate digital media in the home and office.
Devaney sees the NJIT classes as a way for Crestron’s existing workforce to gain new skills, advance to higher-level jobs and create new entry-level openings. “Instead of going outside to the global workforce, we’re retooling our current workforce,” he said.
The classes will begin later this spring, Spak said. They will be similar to courses currently taught by NJIT’s Continuing Professional Education Division at the Newark campus.
For example, the school recently offered a 12-week course that enabled 17 students to become certified in the use of cloud technology that enables companies and people to access data from remote locations on their smart phones or other mobile devices.
‘Tremendous energy’
Understanding how to use that technology will be a useful and in-demand skill as more companies rely upon it as a quick and less expensive way to store and share data, said Ameet Bakshi, a Hackensack resident who completed the course.
“The faculty there was phenomenal,” Bakshi said. “There’s tremendous energy in the program.”
Bakshi, a 34-year-old native of India, works for a Short Hills information technology company that brought him to the United States through the special visa program.
The funds paid by that company, in turn, will pay for instruction for other students such as Bhupendra V. Gadhavi, a Wayne resident and India native who became a U.S. citizen after moving from England in 1987. Gadhavi, 53, has his own company, AceTech Software Corp.
The two classmates illustrate how the program works. The fees that Bakshi’s employer pays to the federal government to bring him to New Jersey under the special visa program will fund the sort of classes that Gadhavi, a U.S. citizen, can then use to advance his own career as a software and programming consultant.
For more information on the federally-funded tech training program or how to enroll, contact Gale Tenen Spak at [email protected].
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via NorthJersey.com