There are plenty of IT jobs out there. Relatively junior level employees are pulling down $60-70k. India and China are pumping out tens of thousands of techical grads each year. In the US we are pumping out watered down/overly generalized majors. Result? Companies are forced to sponsor green cards at $15-20k per pop or they have to leave positions unfilled due to the lack of domestic folks with the proper skillets. What's wrong with is picture?

pecpopofluv, have to agree. The resources we use out of India and China hit the ground running with the right skills. Too many US college grads don't have the right skills or experience. We need colleges to change their approach and more programs like the one mentioned in the article.

This article is a little misleading.... Most jobs mentioned especially medical encoding is not a IT job. Neither would be data entry.

Not sure what resources you are using out of India and China that hit the ground running with the right skills. Three companies I worked for outsourced IT jobs. The people in India don't know how to think on their feet and are dead in the water if something does not follow a script or they are required to make a decision. We have people in India that measure success by the number of service calls they open and close. Only problem is they don't solve the issue. The people back in the US end up doing the work and solving the issue so the company is paying for the outsourced work with no benefit other than faulty service call metrics. The other issue is language skills. Working on a big coding project or hardware issue requires a good grasp of the language your fellow employees speak. I don't mean inability to understand how someone speaks English either. It is email, project plans, the whole gambit of skills that are needed to do the job. Also, the comment about junior grade salaries being 60-70k is a bit flawed. I know senior level IT - read that as non-management in the trenches doing the work - workers who make that salary. The issue is senior management that believes they are saving money when they don't truly know they are wasting it.

Beatyeh...I don't challenge your experience but the $60-70k for junior level resources is my experience. Also, if given my druthers I would prefer to hire domestically to help our citizens. Prob is when job reqs are posted we get no domestic applicants. Your experience seems to be with offshoring which may also be diff from hiring ftes that are on site.

beautyeh, interesting feedback. I work for a Fortune 100 global company and we outsource 65% of all of our IT work with excellent results. Many of them work in our US locations with proper working visas and they have excellent communication skills for working with business partners. I would like to see this trend change but govt sanctions are not the answer. We need to upgrade our educational programs and get more students into math, the sciences. intern programs and programs like the one in this article. Good luck!

"shootz: This article is a little misleading.... Most jobs mentioned especially medical encoding is not a IT job. Neither would be data entry." ---- Agreed. I was expecting to read about a need for newly minted IT employees who can write code for say the NextGen or Fairview MyChart software systems, not just enter "CO" in a box that stands for colonscopy. BUT, at livable wage jobs will be created here and that is important! The article was poorly titled.

Medical coding is not simply data entry. I worked as a software developer for 20 years and I have taken some medical coding classes. The process can be very complex. Getting to the correct code is much like debugging a software program.

I've worked in health care as a software engineer. I agree with the comments above that the positions described in the article aren't really IT, but rather strongly domain analytical. And, yes, the health care domain is complex. As far as importing labor, I've seen mixed results. The one thing I've observed is that if valuable people are chosen over cheap people and the people are tightly integrated with the rest of the workforce, then it works. Otherwise, you get poorly skilled, foreign worker ghettos within the organization and atrocious results. I'd like to see us adopt paid apprenticeship programs such as Germany has. Companies eventually get trained workers, workers get paid, and workers aren't saddled with extreme student loan debt. Lastly, knowing UHG's culture like I do, I'm pretty sure that they're testimony in the article is propaganda related to lifting H1B restrictions. A bean counting culture to be sure. Is it a wonder why my colleagues or I don't want to work there?

So what specific course of action would you recommend to get into this?