The Analysis: Investing in a Tech-Savvy Workforce

While Lockheed Martin's investment in future engineers is a first step, the Center for Technological Literacy's co-directors argue companies should help fund more generalized tech education

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When the National Academies published its 2005 report on preparing the next generation of technical workers, Rising Above the Gathering Storm—it sounded a wake-up call to companies such as Lockheed Martin (LMT), which realized it had to take a proactive role in the training of its next generation of engineers or face a dire talent shortage. But while corporations are only now waking up to this reality, others have been anticipating the need of pre-engineering curricula for more than a decade.

In 1990, Hofstra University engineering professor David Burghardt and New York public school administrator Michael Hacker set out to prepare students for a world they believed would increasingly demand technological know-how in all professions. With funding from small engineering companies in the region, they founded the Center for Technological Literacy, a program launched in 10 school districts in New York. In 1993, the National Science Foundation awarded the program grants which would enable them to work with teachers from hundreds of schools around the country.

Focus on Women and Minorities

The awareness and activism of big business in the classroom comes as a validation and a boon to the nonprofit's mission. "We're very much in favor of the initiative that Lockheed has engaged in," says Hacker. "We believe that it could be a model for other corporations throughout the country."

A particular strength of Lockheed's "Engineers in the Classroom" initiative, according to the educators, is its focus on training women and minorities for technical professions. "Women make up about 45% of the workforce across the country and only 12% of the science and engineering workforce. So role models—particularly role models who are female and minority—can play a very important role in encouraging young people to follow technical paths," says Hacker.

Developing a Tech-Literate Nation

The pair's positive appraisal comes with one caveat. In their 18 years of training teachers and developing technological curricula with the Center for Technological Literacy, they have learned that vocational pipelines, like the one Lockheed Martin hopes to build, can focus too narrowly on one kind of student, and one kind of career. "My concern is that we frame it in a broad enough context so that it works for all students, and not just students who are technologically inclined," says Burghardt.

Adds Hacker, "It's extremely important that we support the flow of technical talent through the pipeline so that this nation has a core of expert technologists, engineers, and scientists. But it's equally important, we believe, that all people have some grounding in technology so that we develop a nation of technologically literate people."

Douglas MacMillan is a staff writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.