World Experience

1. Think and say:

a) What are your wage claims? (How much do you want to earn?)

b) Is it possible to earn much in Russia?

c) Does your future business opportunity depend on your education?

2. Read the text and speak about the value and importance of education.

3. “Education is central”. Prove that these words of Bill Gates are right.

Finding Opportunity in the Global Economy. By Bill Gates.

Today if you had to guess somebody’s approximate income and you were limited to asking one polite question, a good one would be: “What country do you live in?” That’s because of the huge disparities in average wages from country to country.

But a generation from now, if you want to guess someone’s income, a more-telling single question might be: “What’s your education?” This, at least, is my belief. Future business opportunity will turn on educational opportunity — for everyone.

Compared to almost anything else in a developed society, the cost of investment in education is low — and the returns are high. Even the poorest of countries and communities can develop better schools. Education is central because electronic networks and soft-ware-driven technologies are beginning to break down the economic barriers between nations. The Internet and the availability of inexpensive, powerful computers are helping spread opportunity to developing nations.

International communication, which is destined to become extraordinarily cheap in all its forms, will bring suitably educated people from every economic region into the mainstream of the world economy. Well-educated, enterprising individuals with access to information technology will do well no matter where they live.

Nearly a billion people in rural China may find their lives little changed for decades, but tens of millions of the best-educated Chinese could find themselves earning more or less what similarly educated people in the United States or Germany do.

As technology breaks down the barriers of distance and national borders, it will be even more important that everybody be given equal educational opportunities. Eventually, being “poor” won’t be as much a matter of living in a poor country as it will be a matter of having poor skills.

Assuming you want to develop those skills, what should you study? What career should you pursue? At the same time, business and political leaders wonder how they should place their bets on the future. Which industries promise growth and interesting opportunities? There are a lot of opportunities in the knowledge-based global economy, and I’m particularly enthusiastic about the business I know best — software.

Because software is an almost pure expression of logic, the industry is a great field for almost anyone entering the work force today. Just about every technical or scientific discipline will apply. The business side is equally exciting and challenging because the industry is so dynamic.

In the United States, for example, employment by software companies has been growing at a rate of 9.2 percent a year. The software industry provided over 600,000 U.S. jobs in 1996, and that figure is expected to grow to more than 1 million jobs by 2005.

And software jobs are among the highest-paid in the U.S. economy. While the average U.S. worker earned $28,000 a year in 1995, the average employee of software industry earned $57,000. These wages reflect the relative scarcity of skilled high-tech workers, and the importance of the knowledge and energy these workers bring to their companies and the economy.

Creating software is a lot of fun, if you have the temperament for it. It’s rewarding to create a product that helps change the world. A healthy software industry, whether focused on custom software or packaged software for off-the-shelf use, is a fabulous long-term asset for any nation.

A recent study commissioned by the Business Software Alliance, of which Microsoft is a member, found that the U.S. software industry added $67 billion to the economy last year, ranking behind only the motor vehicles and equipment industry ($106 billion) and the electronic components and accessories industry ($78 billion). Of that, the packaged software industry — which was almost nonexistent 25 years ago — now accounts for 42 percent of software revenue and is growing at the rate of 14 percent a year. This is about three times the rate of the overall U.S. economy.

Custom software remains the largest part of the market, but the future belongs to packaged software. The U.S. leads in software by almost any measure, but many nations are destined to play important roles and share the economic benefits of software jobs. Software can be created anywhere, so the opportunity is truly global.

It’s not a win-lose industry, either. More software development in one region does not mean reduced software development in another. Rather, software development as a whole helps to grow the world economy. For example, a Price Waterhouse study found that in 1995 the packaged business software industry generated more than 172,000 jobs and generated more than $4 billion in taxes for Europe. Even developing nations can find excellent local opportunities in software — an industry that is “brains-intensive” rather than capital-intensive — and take advantage of their educational investments.

The value and importance of the software industry — and its employees — will continue to grow indefinitely. At Microsoft, our ability to grow and take on new projects is constrained only by our ability to hire enough good college graduates. It’s been that way for a long time. This is true for other software companies too.

Of course, the benefits of the software industry aren’t limited to the high-wage jobs and tax revenues they provide. Software is transforming the workplace in industry after industry, boosting productivity by redefining how work is accomplished — and helping globalize the world economy.

Key terms.