View Research by Author - Stephanie Riegg

Publications

Education and training investments are critical to the continuation of healthy US productivity growth and to attaining adequate incomes for workers. Unfortunately, employer investments in worker training often fall short of the socially desirable level. This paper examines trends in employer provided training. Data are compared from the 1997 National Employer Survey, the 1995 Survey of Employer Provided Training, and the 1995 National Household Education Survey. Findings show that, in general, a large percentage of establishments -- approximately 70 percent --provide some form of formal training, and between 35 and 65 percent of all workers receive formal training. These estimates are higher than those found in previous literature.

The demand for information technology (IT) workers has increased rapidly over the last decade and is projected to rise much faster than employment as a whole. The expansion of jobs for computer scientists, database administrators, network administrators, web specialists, and systems analysts appears to have exceeded the growth in the supply of U.S. citizens who are trained IT workers. Industry representatives contend that the U.S. faces a shortage of hundreds of thousands of IT workers, a shortage that justifies enlarging, for a second time, the H1-B program that grants 115,000 temporary visas per year.

Return to list of authors