Is There a STEM Worker Shortage?

There is a big mismatch between the many STEM grads and the millions of open STEM jobs around the world. Countries everywhere face this shortage. The main issue is that what students learn differs from what skills companies truly need. There's a gap between theory and practice. Soft skills like creativity and teamwork matter more but traditional STEM programs rarely teach them. This skills gap is a major roadblock. Uneven distribution of STEM talent has created a global imbalance. Some countries have too many grads, others too few.

This reshapes STEM careers globally. Losing skilled workers to things like competition, changing demands, and low pay deeply impacts companies, fields, and economies. Untapped talent in marginalized groups, rural areas, and existing workers present chances to address the skills gap. STEM's future needs adaptability, interdisciplinary thinking, ethical responsibility and inclusion to drive innovation.

#stem

[AnthonyRusso]

Technical role hiring managers make their hiring decision based on hard skills and specific skills, then subsequently complain about new hires lacking soft skills and general skills. They turn their nose up at people with exclusively only an undergrad unless they are purple squirrels and then trash talk academia and demand lots of ultraspecific prior work experience.

Employers are asking for a purple heart as a reward for shooting themselves in the foot.

The lateral move is not as viable as you seem to think at least trying to leave STEM there is no such thing as transferables in practice because they are only paying lip service to soft skills in technical roles while also non-technical roles being complete philistines. They act like different kinds of learning are mutually exclusive like formal academic training pushes pre-existing experientially learned practical skills out like it is reformatting a hard drive.

Employer consolidation not only has the worker adverse consequences the cumbersome bloated corporation has not only insanely leaky timelines, enormous scope creep and the like, but also the predisposition to interdepartmental silo-ing is so dramatically increased. The claimed lack of collaborative skills is in reality an entrenched adversarial work culture across the technical disciplines. The executive roles should be executive across disciplines, imho. Too frequently the departmental manager seem not to realize that the business side of the equation is the actual goal you must do what they want or else even if their will negatively effects the program. Within a given contract people who are not stakeholders have way too much control for having no skin in the game. Being a stakeholder is conducive to performing well because consequences of poor quality work is felt by the stakeholders. If someone is totally insulated from the outcome they don't suffer from their own bad decisions they have no incentive to ensure financial success. It is lost on them that their juvenile bickering is causing gridlock and that is bad for everyone. There is no need for middle managerial personnel when the company doesn't exist anymore but they are too many degrees separated from seeing the self inflicted quality they just blame upper management for institutional failure.

[genuineBenFan]

The emphasis on “soft skills” is often a very limited and/or outdated view of how those skills are relevant to the workplace. A strong sense of individual responsibility and accountability is necessary in STEM, but can come across as a lack of teamwork skills - particularly to someone who prefers to work collaboratively. A hiring manager is looking for what they think an expert looks like, not an expert. The person hired might be the person who writes university curriculum, which creates a negative feedback loop in our education system. I have seen plenty shit lecturers or researchers who “looked good on paper”. Strictly relegating the autonomy to define expertise in a field as the domain of it’s relevant scientific community is the actual systemic change we need

[lafawarz]

Love your channel! The content is worthy of a 1 million subscriber channel