Three Ways to Find STEM Talent in Tight Labor Markets

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Boss, August 2018

by David Mallon



It doesn’t take much more than a glance at job statistics to gauge the shortage of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers. In 2016, in the U.S., 13 STEM jobs were posted online for each unemployed STEM worker—roughly three million more jobs than job seekers. In the fourth quarter of 2017, it took 40 days to fill an ICT (information and communication technology) job in Australia—an increase of nearly 50 percent in two years. This year, a study revealed a shortfall of 173,000 STEM workers in the U.K.—with attendant costs to employers of £1.5 billion annually.

The consequences of this persistent shortage of STEM workers aren’t relegated to technology companies. All sorts of enterprises need data scientists, app developers, and STEM workers in a host of other specialties, including cybersecurity, AI, voice tech, and robotics. Moreover, STEM skills are increasingly required in jobs that aren’t categorically technical in nature: the Business-Higher Education Forum reported that 67 percent of the 2.35 million job postings in the U.S. in 2015 were “analytics-enabled.” These include management jobs that require the ability to use decision-making technologies, and functional jobs, like HR and marketing, in which the use of analytics is becoming commonplace.

So, what can your company do to ensure a ready supply of candidates with STEM skills when they are already scarce, and demand is likely to make them scarcer still in the years ahead? Here are three ideas that have worked for other companies...read the rest here.