A few weeks ago, I was quoted in The Wall Street Journal for expressing that President Obama's speech on jobs would have benefited from more specifics on the need to train people in the skill sets that are in huge demand in the economy right now. To elaborate on this, according to a recent McKinsey & Company report, the U.S. needs to create 21 million new jobs by 2020 to bring employment back to pre-recession levels. Downsizing and offshoring get most of the press when it comes to job loss, but an important and less-frequently discussed part of the equation is the fact that technology is outpacing the skills of today's worker, and in many cases sending jobs overseas.

How many jobs? In my IT staffing practice, on average about one third of the positions we staff go to H-1B visas not because of cost, but because there simply aren't enough qualified domestic applicants. The number is even higher for technologies like .Java, .Net, SQL, PHP, and MY SQL where the majority go to H-1B. As we seek to create jobs, shouldn't we be just as concerned about making sure our workforce is qualified to take jobs that are already there?

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