By Kevin Bouffard
The Ledger

05/14/2006

Richard Powers knows the engineering work is out there and that his
company, BCI Engineering & Scientists, has the talent to compete
for its share of the growing market.

The
big problem will be finding enough skilled employees to do the work,
said Powers, the president and chief executive officer of the Lakeland
company.

“For more than two years now, the demand for people has
been extreme,” he said. “We are not making phone calls (looking for
business). If we got any more work, we don’t know how we would do it.”

BCI
employs 120 people and has 18 openings requiring degrees in engineering
or science, such as biology or geotechnical engineering, a branch of
geology dealing with soils and minerals, said Powers, a licensed
geologist. The latter shortage is particularly acute.

“If we can find four of them, they’d have work right away,” he said.

If finding 18 people seems challenging, it actually represents progress, Powers said. A year ago, BCI had 30 such job openings.

“This is the firs time in years I can remember having less than 20,” he said.

In 1997, when Powers bought a controlling interest in the company, BCI had about 40 employees with $3 million in annual revenue.

Powers
and senior managers developed an aggressive growth plan that added
services, including water resource and environmental consulting, and
new Florida offices in Orlando, Jupiter and Minneola.

Last year
the company had $13 million in revenue and expects to top $15 million
this year, Powers said. It hopes to reach $30 million by 2010.

Only the shortage of skilled labor will hold his company back, Powers added.

BCI hardly faces that problem alone.

“We
see that not only in our profession but in speaking to my (business)
colleagues,” said Anu Saxena, an engineer and president of
Ascgeosciences Inc., another Lakeland engineering firm. “Business
owners today not only have to manage financial capital, they have to
manage their human capital.”

The shortages exist particularly
large in growth states like Florida, said Pramod Khargonekar, the dean
of the College of Engineering at the University of Florida in
Gainesville.

“The number of graduates hasn’t increased that much, but the demand has boomed,” Khargonekar said.

In
Florida, the shortages have cropped up in fields such as civil and
geotechnical engineering related to the state’s construction boom,
Saxena and Khargonekar agreed. Geotechnical engineering includes soil
and construction materials testing and construction inspection.

All
three engineers traced the skilled labor shortage to two factors
largely beyond the profession’s ability to control: The decline of
graduates in scientific fields from U.S. colleges and the increasing
difficulty in recruiting foreign-born professionals because of the post
9/11 controversy over federal immigration policies.

U.S.
colleges will produce 45,000 graduates with technical degrees, Powers
said. China alone will produce 1.5 million such graduates, and India
nearly as many.

“The problem is in the elementary, middle and
high schools,” he said. “Their whole experience in earth science might
be one chapter in one book.”

Lack of trained science teachers
means not only that students get a poor foundation in academics, but
indifferent teachers fail to motivate students to consider a career in
science fields, Powers said.

“Deficiencies in science and
engineering start in the elementary, middle and high schools,” Saxena
agreed. “The schools need to do more to prop up interest in the
sciences.”

The UF engineering college turns out about 950
graduates a year, Khargonekar said, but it could immediately increase
that to 1,200 if enough students showed interest.

“The other
thing we don’t do in this country is get enough women involved in
engineering and science,” he said. “In the middle schools, there’s this
kind of subliminal message sent to girls that science and engineering
are not for them.”

Powers and Saxena said professionals and
scientific societies are pushing for better science education in the
public schools. But Khargonekar did not absolve the professions
entirely.

“We in the engineering community haven’t done enough
to tell people what engineers do,” the dean said. “Everybody knows what
a doctor does and what a lawyer does, but nobody knows what an engineer
does.”

U.S. companies traditionally turned to foreign-born
students who obtained technical degrees in their own countries or at
U.S. universities.

Since 9/11, fewer foreign students are
studying at U.S. universities, said Khargonekar, a native of India now
a U.S. citizen, and it has become harder for those that do matriculate
to find jobs in this country after graduation.

“What has
happened for the last three years is a growing perception that the
United States is not friendly to foreigners,” he said. “When I came
here (in 1978) it was very friendly.”

Many of BCI’s most recent
hires have been foreign-born professionals, said Les Bromwell, BCI’s
founder and a principal engineer. The last four hires in the water
resources group, the company’s largest, are from India, Turkey,
Thailand and China.

“We’re a little United Nations,” he said.

Still, Bromwell and Powers said, that route has become much longer and strewn with more red tape.

The
process at the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service of moving
from a student visa, which allows a person to work at a U.S. company
for a year after graduation, to a permanent resident with a “green
card” takes at least five years, Bromwell said. Citizenship can take 10
years or longer.

“I view that as a tremendous barrier,” Powers
said. “They (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials) are
tremendously inefficient and not at all concerned with the needs of
business. (USCIS) is much more concerned about their process than
results and achievement.”

Moreover, the stiffening of U.S. visa
requirements comes at a time when other countries are competing more
effectively for skilled workers.

“Many engineers who came here
from India and China are no longer coming here. If they do come here
(for a degree), they go back because there’s more opportunity in their
home countries,” Saxena said. “Why come to America for opportunities
when there are opportunities in your own backyard.”

Khargonekar
sounded an optimistic note. Federal officials have come to realize they
are losing the global competition for top scientists and engineers, he
said, and they have begun relaxing entry restrictions for skilled
workers and degree-seeking students.

That suits BCI executives.
What Bromwell started as an engineering company catering to the
phosphate industry has branched out to embrace more than a dozen
engineering disciplines. Among them are aquatic restoration, geologic
hazards, investigative engineering and geographical information
services and database development.

It serves six major market areas — government, mining, industry, insurance, land development and construction.

Although
it does most of its business in Florida, Powers said, BCI has a global
reach that includes projects in India, Brazil, Jamaica and St. Croix.

Among its more nearby projects are:

•  Aquatic restorations of Lakeland’s Banana Lake, the St. John’s River and the Lake Morton shoreline.

• 
Civil engineering, such as the ongoing Eloise Redevelopment and
Revitalization Plan and a revitalization of downtown Inverness.

•  Environmental reclamation projects such as the Tenoroc Fish Management Area.

Beginning
in the middle 1980s and accelerating in 1997, when Powers took control,
BCI officials realized the company had to diversify from it original
base in the boom-or-bust phosphate industry, the CEO said.

“There
was a new energy. There was a strong realization that, if we don’t
diversify our services and our client base, we probably will not be
around long,” Powers said.

Via TheChannelInsider.com
05/05/2006
By Pedro Pereira 

It has always been so. Humans have always roamed, now assimilating, now displacing.

More often than not, who is displacing whom causes the debate. In
the current furor over immigration, the debate revolves around whether
illegal workers who sneak in mostly through the U.S. southern border
are doing jobs Americans don’t want or are taking them away from
Americans.

In the high-tech world, a similar debate centers on so-called
H-1B visas, which allow folks from places such as India, Russia and the
Philippines to enter the United States legally to do temporary jobs
that ostensibly would go unfilled for lack of qualified workers.

Employers of H-1B workers include Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and
IBM. Among the strongest supporters of the visa program are folks like
Bill Gates and former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy.

The government caps the number of H-1B visas annually at
65,000, but if supporters have their way, that number will jump to
115,000. As the debate over illegal immigration continued to rage this
week, a bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate to hike the number of
visas.

The bill, introduced by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, proposes to
increase the H-1B cap to 115,000, with options to raise the ceiling
annually by 20 percent based on employers’ needs. Some supporters would
love to see the cap pushed back up to the 2001-2003 number of 195,000.

As with all things immigration, H-1B visas are controversial.
Opponents dispute the supporters’ position that visas are necessary to
accommodate a shortage of highly skilled professionals in technology
and related jobs. Almost all H-1B visa holders have bachelor’s degrees,
and about half of them also hold advanced degrees.

Visa holders drive down wages for everybody because employers
pay H-1B visa holders less than they pay American counterparts, say
opponents.

Of course, the salary differential does not apply to all
employers, and some companies, such as Microsoft, IBM and Apple, are
reputed to pay H-1B holders salaries that are comparable to or higher
than the pay of American counterparts.

Visa supporters say the 65,000 cap is too stingy and stifles
innovation, the argument being visa holders who would otherwise
contribute to technology advances may never set foot in the United
States.

Both sides have valid points.

The H-1B program has a place in our economy. It fills skills gaps and has other benefits.

H-1B helps keep VARs up to speed. Click here to read more.

For instance, channel companies have used money from the fees
paid by employers of H-1B visa workers to train their own staffs on
much-needed IT skills. The money was disbursed by the Department of
Labor through the H-1B Technical Skills Training Grant Program.

The question is whether the government should raise the cap.
Before making that decision, due diligence is needed. Do we truly need
more H-1B visa holders? Are employers doing everything they can to give
the jobs to citizens or permanent residents before resorting to H-1B
visa hires? One way to ensure they do would be to raise the fees.

In addition, employers that abuse the program by paying visa holders less than they would other workers should be penalized.

Furthermore, if we are going to continue importing skilled
workers because they make an important contribution to our economy, we
should reward them accordingly. The pathway to U.S. citizenship for
these folks should be simpler and quicker. First, they must obtain
green cards, approval for which can take years. Citizenship is possible
only after five years of having a green card.

So what should we expect to happen? Most likely Congress will
simply increase the visa cap without any meaningful analysis, and the
debate will rage on. And so it goes with immigration.

Via Indiatimes.com

Otherwise, the candidate should wait abroad for his/her
H-1B. If you are an F-1 student on optional practical training (OPT) you need to
process an H-1B at this time i.e. in April in order to remain with the employer
past the expiration date of the OPT.

When the US Senate failed to
agree on changes to US immigration laws concerning illegal immigrants and border
control recently, these were not the only issues left pending. The question of
increase in H1-B quota was also left unanswered. The latest Bill has recommended
that the H-1B cap is lifted from annual 65,000 to 115,000 for 3 years.

Thereafter, the cap may rise up to 20% per year if the whole cap
(115,000) is used up in the prior year. If the cap is not reached, then the cap
in the following year will remain the same as the current year. It has to be
seen what happens to this proposal when the Senate debates the Bill further
after reconvening.

The average waiting period to get a green card is
six years or longer and currently there are over half a million application
pending, according to Immigration Voice, an advocacy group that tracks US
government data.

With economies in Asia and the South Pacific on the
rise, an exodus of foreign workers is taking place. Tired of waiting for US
permanent residence permit, people are either returning home or choosing to work
elsewhere overseas.

With the ‘baby boomer generation’
reaching retirement age, experts predict a shortage of skilled professionals to
replace them. About 70,000 IT students graduate out of US universities annually.

Many predict that the number won’t meet the need for a
projected 600,000 additional openings for IT professionals between 2002 and
2012, and the openings created by retirements.

They believe the
problem will spread unless the government allows more foreign workers to enter
the country, and speed up their residency process. Some critics, however, say
increasing the numbers of skilled foreign workers would depress wages and take
positions away from American workers.

“We should only issue
work-related visas if we really need them,” said Caroline Espinosa, a
spokeswoman with Numbers USA, a group pushing for immigration reduction.
“There are 2.5 million native born American workers in the math and
computer field who are currently out of work. It begs the question whether we
truly need foreign workers.”

In his February economic report,
President Bush outlined proposals to overhaul the system for employment-based
green cards. Bush’s proposals were to exempt spouses and children from the
annual limit of 140,000 green cards. Dependents make up about half of all green
cards issued annually.

Secondly, to replace the existing cap with a
flexible market based cap that responds to the needs employers have for
employing foreign labour. And finally, to raise the 7% limit for green cards
issued to nations such as India that have many highly skilled
workers.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued
its first H1B Cap Report for Fiscal Year (FY) 2007, which begins October 1,
2006. The report shows that, at the end the day on April 3, 2006, the first
business day that FY2007 cap-subject cases could be filed, the USCIS received
1,631 H1B filings (subject to the 65,000 quota) and 340 Masters H1Bs (subject to
the 20,000.quota).


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