Government policymakers should take steps to shape the labor market environment by:

1. Supporting training and research and improving data collection. Specifically, government should:

   • Provide incentives for employers to increase training. Under conditions of sustained growth, market forces alone are unlikely to balance the supply of and demand for IT labor. This argues for some form of government incentives for employers to increase training. For example, a mix of public and private funding could support regional training consortia in which member companies define the training program, and 2- and 4-year colleges provide some of the pedagogical resources. Sharing the costs and benefits of training might be especially helpful for smaller IT firms that lack expertise and resources for training.

   • Collect more timely, disaggregated data on different dimensions of the IT workforce and flows into and out of it. The committee has found existing data to be lacking in detail and too out-of-date for many purposes. To make empirically based policy and business decisions, disaggregated data are needed on the size of the IT labor force, including information on all forms of compensation and data describing the career paths of IT workers. These data must be made available more quickly, in more detail, and for larger samples than data the government typically collects through surveys such as the Current Population Survey and the Occupational Employment Statistics program. Better data on immigration are also needed to analyze the role of foreign workers in the IT sector.

   • Support research directed toward reducing tightness in the IT labor market by addressing areas such as organizing work for improved productivity, developing structured assessment tools specialized for IT jobs, improving software engineering (focusing on flexibility, security, reliability, manageability, quality of service, modifiability, scalability, and reuse), and achieving a better integration of the above areas. More generally, support of high-risk, high-payoff research would help to retain and attract top researchers in and to academia.

2. Ensuring that foreign workers are as free as domestic workers to change jobs, and streamlining the green-card process, i.e., the process through which a foreign worker can obtain permanent residency in the United States. Much of the controversy over the H-1B program is rooted in the belief that the use of H-1B workers places U.S. workers at a disadvantage, because the H-1B workers' lack of mobility and their status as “temporary” in the labor force enable employers to exploit them in ways that are not possible when more mobile workers, such as U.S. citizens and green-