Two weeks ago, I had the chance to visit Wisconsin, where I grew up. It’s a state that has obviously been in the news lately in the context of the presidential election. It’s also a state with a rich history of industrial innovation that helped propel the United States to global leadership. The country’s first hydroelectric power plant, built in my home town of Appleton in 1882, helped light the way towards the future that includes the electronic devices we enjoy today. Yet Wisconsin, like many states, also faces new and complex challenges due to the nonstop pace of societal and technological change and the issues that arise with it.

Visiting a political battleground state whose voters helped decide the tumultuous presidential election led me to reflect on what’s ahead for our country. Among other things, our recent election laid bare the struggle of many Americans who feel left out and unable to participate in the economic growth and opportunities created by our rising digital economy.

This frustration is felt by more than a few of the people of Wisconsin. And what’s happening there mirrors what’s happening across our country and more broadly in a number of other nations.  

Building a cloud for everyone

I believe the IT industry has a special role to play in moving our country forward. The IT sector is creating new opportunities, companies, and jobs on a weekly basis. Yet technology is also disrupting businesses, automating tasks, and sometimes even displacing jobs. We need to be mindful as an industry and a country of both sides of this coin. And we need to address with shared responsibility across the private and public sectors the broad needs of the population and not just those who benefit the most readily from rapid change. That, perhaps as much as anything else, is one of the principal lessons of this year’s election.

There is both good and bad news that we need to consider.

The good news starts with the new and democratizing opportunities that technology is creating. Cloud computing is enabling people and organizations everywhere to harness massive computing power from datacenters distributed across the country and around the world. This shared computing power enables the smallest businesses in our economy to access the same tools and technology that benefit our country’s largest enterprises.

I witnessed this phenomenon in Wisconsin. Award-winning new businesses in Wisconsin touch everything from human health and transportation to agriculture, the water supply and infrastructure. They show that every company is becoming a digital company. This offers new opportunities for our workforce, technology in all forms, and our education system.

Yet there is bad news as well. While the transformative power of the cloud has helped organizations and people around the world improve their businesses and lives, this economic boon is not shared by everyone. We need to recognize that many people today are unable to benefit from the emerging digital economy because they lack the appropriate skills and opportunities to master them.

Creating a learning economy

What this means for business is clear: you can only be a healthy business if you are a learning business and are investing in the continued training of your own employees. What it means for a digital economy is that we must be a learning economy and pursue the same goal as a nation.

You can see this in the data on national employment growth over the last quarter century. In the United States, there are 7.3 million fewer jobs available for people with only a high school diploma than there were in 1989.[1] Yet for the past quarter century, we've seen steady growth and a doubling in new jobs for people with at least a four-year college degree. That’s a big gap.

We feel this wide skills disparity in the tech sector. As a nation, we have 600,000 open computing jobs but last year we produced only 40,000 new four-year computer science graduates. In Wisconsin, there are 7,699 open computing jobs, but the state’s universities and colleges last year added only 890 computer science graduates to fill them. [2]

It's also not a gap that starts in college. It starts much earlier.

Across America we have 37,000 high schools, but only 4,310 — a mere 12 percent — offer an advanced placement (AP) course in computer science. In Wisconsin, of 500 high schools in a strong public education system, only 80 high schools offer this AP course.[3] As digital technology continues to turn every company in part into a digital business, this need for employees with these digital skills will continue to grow.

Yet it would be wrong to conclude that this issue is solely about coding and digital skills. As a country we also have unmet needs in a variety of other fields. Increasingly these involve so-called middle skills that require less than a four-year college degree but some type of post-secondary or community college credential.

I saw this broadening phenomenon in two recent examples. In October I spent a day in Switzerland, where youth unemployment hovers at a low four percent, learning about the country’s highly-valued apprenticeship programs. We started the morning at CSL Behring, a company in Bern that is a leader in plasma protein therapeutics. I talked with high school students in the apprentice program and learned how they spend three days a week at the company mastering – and getting paid for – skills that go beyond what I remember from my high school chemistry class.

Just a week ago I was struck in a similar way by a tweet from the Appleton Post-Crescent in Wisconsin. It highlighted a $1.7 million expansion at the Fox Valley Technical College to expand its lab for welding and metal fabrication.[4] Why is this investment important? Because there is a need to keep up with job openings in the field and workers can earn paychecks that increase by up to 35 percent or more by combining the right type of experience with the right kind of post-secondary credentials.

What, then, is the outlook for America’s changing workforce, and how do we educate people and make sure that the IT sector plays a positive role? If we’re prepared to look at concrete examples both near and far, there is an abundance of answers.

There are many opportunities to better align the needs of the labor market with the courses and degrees offered by our community colleges and universities. We also have opportunities to modernize ongoing learning offerings with a more agile method of delivering certificates, training and apprenticeships. And while we focus on the question of affordability, we must simultaneously do a better job of helping those students who start college to finish it as well.

We all need to chip in and consider new opportunities for innovation. Educational institutions can build on their recent successes by continuing to adapt to the labor market needs of a changing economy. The public sector as a whole has a critical supporting role to play. And the tech industry can better support the economy’s broad-based needs with services and tools to help meet these needs.

Right here on LinkedIn, we can see the potential of what tech companies and tech nonprofits can contribute with services and tools that help individuals build new skills and connect with new jobs. And as we at Microsoft think about our potential combined future with LinkedIn, it’s clear we’ve only started to scratch the surface with what we can achieve.

Building infrastructure to support a digital economy

All of this is also timely as the nation looks ahead to 2017 and the potential for new investments in the country’s infrastructure. This is because 21st Century infrastructure requires not only improved roads and bridges, but access to the internet that has become indispensable for economic opportunity.

In Wisconsin, as elsewhere, many people live in communities with no high-speed broadband access at all.[5] According to the 2016 FCC Broadband Progress Report, 10 percent of all Americans – 34 million people – lack access to quality broadband.[6]

Vilas County in northern Wisconsin, which I visited over many summers while growing up, provides a great example of schools, businesses, and the state and local government banding together to secure FCC funding to spread broadband to 90 percent of the rural county. This successful public-private approach is an example for others to consider.  

Forging new ways to work together

Regardless of our politics, this is a time to look beyond disagreements and divides, find bold solutions to common problems, and forge new ways of working together. Those of us in the tech sector need to ask: how do we help address the challenges of this era of technological change?

The answer needs to start by heightening our own sense of curiosity. We have a lot to learn about how we can better equip people across the economy to master the skills they will need for success.

But causes for optimism exist all around us. While in Milwaukee, I visited an old but elegant warehouse that dates to 1875 and Wisconsin’s first decades of statehood. Inside I visited Gener8tor, a nationally-regarded accelerator. I learned from co-founder Joe Kirgues about the new businesses they are supporting and met the young people starting companies there. I found myself talking to people who could hold their own with the best and brightest individuals I’ve met at similar facilities in Seattle, San Francisco, Berlin, and Shanghai. I was excited to see them bringing new successes in such an exciting way to the state where I had grown up.

This example and their work won’t provide all the answers we need. But without question, their work – and the inspiration of their example – has an important role to play in our collective future.

[1]Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce – America’s divided Recovery: College Haves and Have Nots

[2]Code.org

[3]Code.org

[4]Appleton Post-Crescent Media

[5]Public Service Commission of Wisconsin, State Broadband Office,

[6] 2016 FCC Broadband Progress Report

Originally published on Linkedin Pulse