Well perhaps....
Love your all
Amazing!
<o> Is the "STEM Shortage" a myth in The USA ? <o>
It is both in my view.
There are too many people getting degrees in fields with limited usefulness. I knew some people getting degrees in medieval literature, and there isn't much of a market for that. University education is not job training, but some topics have better employment prospects than others.
On the other hand, companies have shifted from where they were years ago. Too many employers are looking for drop-in replacements and refuse to train anyone. Some fields like medicine and teaching have requirements for continuous training. In our field most employers refuse to provide continuous education, and then just fire the old team and hire a new team with updated skills. Perhaps a few people can get trained on newer technologies on the company's money, but most of us are expected to learn on our own time. Too many employers look for exactly-experienced workers who have been programming in old technology up until yesterday, but also have five years with the new technology.
I think this is a really bad strategy used by companies. They are just demoralizing their workers. How can one focus on making an awesome game when their livelihood is at threat? I sure couldn't
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I think this is a really bad strategy used by companies. They are just demoralizing their workers. How can one focus on making an awesome game when their livelihood is at threat? I sure couldn't
In my line of work your job only lasts as long as the project. Once the project is over - so is your job.
Since there are so many "educated" folks flooding the jobs market, "skilled" workers are becoming very disposable .
I'm reading a story here about how there is a growing trend toward a disposable workforce in the software development, engineering, & science fields.
Before I got my job I noticed in software there's a large demand for temporary jobs. So basically contract positions. I'd be curious if a perceived shortage might be related to that. I wasn't looking at all the contract positions because I wanted to move and start a career not just start a 6 month job then be forced to move on. I could definitely see where non-software companies are looking to have things made and they put up a job listing for "8 month contract for boring software on-site in Kentucky" then don't get many hits and assume there's a shortage.
I think there's a miscommunication here. The STEM jobs article doesn't say they were unable to find jobs. They simply say that 74% of people who studied STEM disciplines don't work a STEM-related job. There's more to it than just the jobs in the field you studied. A lot of guys in the engineering program with me got jobs as analysts at Goldman Sachs during their degree because the pay was better than being a code monkey on some campus website or working as a lab tech. When they graduated, Goldman offered them a position that had a higher salary than any entry-level job that they could have taken in their field because they racked up experience working for them during their degree. They went where the money was and they ended up staying there for a long time. This kind of thing might also couple with students thinking they like this STEM field, but then later realize they would rather do something else.
The other articles I can see that being truly representative of the job market. Studying medieval Scandinavian literature might be rewarding, but it's not a skill that will win over HR reps. I think the real problem is that college students are biased towards the non-STEM fields because teachers are teaching mathematics terribly. Any teacher who teaches classes above the 5th grade level (and some probably below that) will tell you that the curriculum is poor and most students end up hating math before they get out of basic algebra. They then naturally shift toward something that isn't confusing, like English lit or social science. Fixing that is the first step to fixing the "STEM problem".
Whenever you hear an employer say, "I can't find a STEM major to fill my opening", you have to append the words "...for the price I want to pay."
I think it's possible that the term "STEM" obfuscates the problem. I don't believe believe there are any shortages in the maths and sciences. There's not a lot of science graduates in the school I graduated from to be sure, but there wasn't exactly a lot of demand for them either. Engineering is a wash -- it really depends on the discipline. Comp Sci guys though are in high demand -- basically every CS grad from my uni had job offers before they graduated, and it's not a prestigious school or hi-tech hotspot.
The only people who believe theres a shortage of 'STEM' workers are the guys that don't work there. Sure there are 'STEM' fields where you can more easily get a job than other industries ie CompSci vs Renaissance Studies. But its nowhere near the golden fields of opportunity fallow of workers the politicians and ceos like to whine about. Even CompSci has severe challenges of outsourcing, overwork, and stability while many other disciplines like BioSci are overcrowded with Medschool washouts and is 50% forsaken grad students/postdocs toiling on the plantation. We could argue that we need science till the cows come home but the fact remains that society does a lot to pump up STEM at school but virtually abandons students by the time they graduate. At least with Humanities you don't have the talking heads pushing disinterested women, minorities, and h1bs into an already saturated market at the same time.
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