If you’ve been to a technology conference in the last few years then you’ve heard about our country’s STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education crisis. You’ve heard that our country’s future economy depends on training more students in these critical fields to prepare them for jobs in programming, engineering and more.
A lot of statistics get thrown around to illustrate the problem. Primarily, most communicators working on STEM position the issue as an economic one, and use data to show how the crisis affects the sustainability of growth for the tech and advanced manufacturing industries. If you need a primer, check out this helpful infographic from Microsoft. The most standout stat to me is that 80 percent of jobs in the next decade will require technology skills while, at this rate, just 16 percent of bachelor’s degrees in 2020 will specialize in STEM.
The problem is so pronounced that many companies and nonprofits have made STEM education the centerpiece of their corporate social responsibility and grant programs. Groups like Code.org, a learning website sponsored by the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, is a great example. We had the pleasure to see its founder, Hadi Partovi, pitch the importance of Code.org at last year’s GeekWire Summit. You can see a video of his presentation here.
To put another exclamation point on the issue, just this week President Obama referenced the need for better STEM education in his State of the Union address.
The point is, STEM education is critically important to the tech industry, and many companies, industry leaders and nonprofits are all pushing in numerous ways to solve the problem. But even now, with the attention of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and President Obama, it can still be difficult to communicate the problem of STEM broadly.
Why is that?
Similar to communicating around technology products or trends, communicating around STEM education often requires translating complex concepts, data or information into easily digestible articles. Just like it can be a challenge (albeit a fun one!) to tell a story about a new niche software product, it can be difficult to explain how a student’s success in AP Physics might impact our country’s future economy.
But this makes tech PR professionals the right voices to communicate the importance of STEM. It’s an issue that is relevant to our clients and therefore to our business, and it deals with topics that we work on almost every day.
At Communiqué PR, we see a number of organizations with footprints in the Seattle area focusing on STEM, such as Boeing, Microsoft, The Bezos Family Foundation, Google and many others. Washington STEM is one of the area’s leading nonprofits working on the issue. I’ve been impressed with the group’s ability to work with state policymakers and corporate citizens while making the issue accessible to the general public.
But while many large tech companies have put their stamp on the STEM Issue, Seattle’s smaller tech companies and startups rely on the same talent pool. They should also play a role in solving our STEM issue. Our local public radio station, KUOW, reported last year that more than 48,000 software engineers were employed in the Seattle metro area. In addition to mainstays in the Seattle market like Amazon and Microsoft, Silicon Valley companies like Google are growing their engineering presences in Seattle to take advantage of our city’s tech talent.
This is only going to increase competition for local talent and make it more important than ever for us to train the next generation of workers—especially as startups and small and midsize tech companies must compete more and more for talent with tech giants.
It’s been more than six years since the U.S. National Academies published its report on the STEM crisis, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” and launched the modern STEM movement. Two presidential administrations and countless corporate grant dollars later, it’s just as big of a problem today as it was then. And while some in the tech industry might be feeling STEM fatigue, it’s critical to continue to keep focusing on the issue—particularly for those growing and smaller tech companies who need smart new team members.
That’s why it’s crucial for tech communicators to keep telling the jobs story on STEM and to make sure all stakeholders—small and large tech companies, legislators and residents of cities buoyed by tech growth—understand its importance.
Credit: Microsoft Corporation, www.microsoft.com.