STEM minus IT = BS

Ponder this quote that was sent to me ….

“A lack of skills in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in the current and emerging workforce is holding back Australia’s economy. A recent survey by AIG, which spoke to 300 businesses across the country, found nearly half were having difficulty recruiting technicians and trade workers with STEM skills.”

And then a report from PwC pops up with the same rubbish. My guess that the source of all this tripe is the GO8, the sandstone universities, looking for funding to prop up their ailing science and engineering faculties. I could be wrong; this is just a guess.

The real issue is that businesses are having trouble hiring IT workers at reasonable cost due to supply and demand pressures. They don’t mind whining about it either.

But if you subtract IT types from STEM (to get STEM minus IT) and re-asked all those businesses the question they would say ‘we hardly need any of them (science graduates, mathematicians, old school engineers) and when we do there is no issue finding them’.

This is a case of a false grouping seeking to create the illusion of a problem so that a bunch of educators can get even more money off the government.

The result? Graduates in the sciences and old-school engineering fields that study for years and end up having to get jobs outside of their fields of expertise.

We are already training way too many scientists and old school engineers and it makes no sense to double down on this problem.

Also, salaries in these areas drop as supply and demand gets unbalanced to the supply side, which puts downwards pressure on the quality of the candidates entering these fields.

We are in the digital age and the relative demand for scientists and old school engineers will continue to decline over the next few decades. IT graduates, on the other hand, we won’t be able to train enough of them.

So please stop using the false grouping, STEM!