The Impact of Information Technology Use on Employee Demography and Employer-Provided Training
This ITWF award provides support to analyze national data on establishments, their characteristics, and the experiences of their employees to examine questions concerning the relationship between information technology (IT) use by employers and employment related outcomes. The project will first analyze the distribution of women and minorities in IT jobs, as classified not only by the tasks employees perform but the IT systems in place at work. It will then explore factors that explain the incidence of women and minorities across IT jobs, including aspects such as career paths (e.g., internal promotions and temp-to-permanent tracks) and how employees are managed. Finally, it will explore how attributes of IT use relate to employer-provided training: Do IT-intensive employers provide more IT training, especially to their IT workers? When they provide IT training, do they offer credentials for it? If so, what accounts for their ability to provide such general training?
The investigators will examine these questions using unique data from the National Employer Surveys of the U.S. Bureau of the Census. These establishment surveys, conducted in 1994, 1997, and 2000, identify important characteristics about employers including their use of IT and their general management practices. The 2000 version also contains a Supplement that surveys employees in these establishments. It identifies IT-related tasks, IT-related training, and demographic attributes of employees such as whether they are women or minorities. These data will be enhanced by information from the Census of Manufacturing Supplement on Information Technology, also conducted in 2000, which has especially good measures of various IT interventions. The data from these different sources will be merged, allowing examination of relationships not only with individual-level IT tasks, such as programming, but also with the use of specific IT systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The combination of more detailed measures of IT use and information about individual IT workers will allow more careful analysis than ever before of relationships between IT use and employee characteristics and employment outcomes. In particular, rather than classifying workers crudely into "IT" or "Non-IT" jobs (in the past typically based on the employer's product market), the analyses can examine relationships between the extent of IT use and important job outcomes, especially for women and minorities.
