On Australia’s young ICT skills gap

The number of Australian ICT professionals under the age of 30 has declined 66% in the last three years – according to a recent Greythorn Recruitment survey (ZDNet). Two reasons are given:

• Less graduates were coming through the education system (a drop of 36% in university enrolments since the peak in 2001)
• More young workers (up to 66%) were considering working overseas

(source: Greythorn quoted in ZDNet, 2014)

Previous STEM crisis articles, particularly the ‘STEM Crisis is a Myth‘ article from Robert Cherette, have commented on the boom/bust nature of ICT aspirations – that roughly every 10-15 years the tech sector experiences rapid growth and then collapses leaving a pile of faded dreams and jaded employees. In Australia our boom was 2001 – that was the height of university enrolments in tech degrees. The above charts capture this shift in demographics: anyone starting their degree in 2001 (aged roughly 17 or 18) would now be 30 or 31. By 2008 enrolments had dropped to 50% of the 2001 peak – this gives us a low replacement rate as evidenced above.

The Commonwealth’s Department of Education recently reported that “employers have little difficulty recruiting workers that meet who meet their skill level expectations” (Skills Shortage Australia, 2014). This may be the case in late 2013, early 2014 but I wonder what it will be like in five years time. One of the findings of last year’s AWPA report was that while there are currently enough ICT workers in Australia, younger generations are having trouble developing enough experience to be considered for local employment.

Google Chief Warns of Skills Shortage

Maile Carnegie, managing director of Google Australia was quoted in today’s Australian:

… (Maile) Carnegie, (managing director of Google Australia), is addressing one of her chief concerns about Australia’s future.

Why, she asks, have 52 per cent of all graduates emerging from Singapore universities studied STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) and computer science courses, compared to just 16 per cent from Australian universities?

“We’re going backwards,” Carnegie warns. “The number of students with a computer science background in Australia has actually declined by 30 per cent since 2001.

“The long-term challenge for Australia is how do we, as a minimum, keep pace with the global revolution that is happening? But the more immediate challenge is how to make sure we don’t slip further behind.”

On this first anniversary of her appointment to (arguably) Australia’s coolest job, Carnegie has two key messages.

The first is that if primary and secondary school kids haven’t learned to love science in the formative years, it’s too late to expect Australian universities to turn out world-challenging science and technology talents…

Her second core message is that if Australians think we have been changed unrecognisably over the past 15 years by the digital technology revolution, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

The broader context for the article is the launch of the Australian element of  Google’s Impact Challenge – an initiative to financially support (up to $500,000) ideas that address social concerns.  The main point I pull from this quote is the word ‘formative’. That we need to introduce these skills at a young age.

The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage – part 3

Article: The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage (Michael S Teitelbaum, The Atlantic, March 2014)

Michael Teitelbaum, and his book Falling Behind?: Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent (pub March 2014), is the genesis of a number of recent articles questioning the ongoing race to increase the number of STEM graduates in the USA (and most countries in the world).

Teitelbaum believes these cries have ‘misallocated public and private resources by periodically expanding higher education in science and engineering beyond levels for which there were attractive carer opportunities’. His research claims we have been through five 10-15 year alarm/boom/bust cycles to date – the first three related to the Cold War need to better the Eastern Bloc, the last two related to globalisation and the rise of India/China. It is possible we would have hit a sixth cycle around 2007 but the global recession disrupted that.

This is the third article I have reviewed on this matter and the argument is becoming very familiar (ironic given this article starts out reminding us that STEM crisis alarmists are operating in an echo chamber). It goes some like like: a) if skills are in high demand then salaries would increase, b) there are currently 100-200% more students graduating in STEM majors than there are jobs, c) IT unemployment sits around 11.7% and d) amongst college educated information technology workers under 30, temporary workers from abroad comprise the large majority.

This line of thinking suggests that shortages are related to particular geographies (such as Silicon Valley or major regional hubs) or niche skills sets (such as social media, security, big data etc). Teitelbaum reminds us that college graduates employed in science and engineering occupations actually comprise only a small fraction of the national workforce (I think its about 5-6% in IT). The article points out that IT careers are unstable, have slow-growing wages and there is a high risk of jobs moving offshore. Doesn’t sound that rosy does it?

One thing that the articles do agree on is that the average performance of American K-12 students is fairly ordinary in international STEM testing. This article then counters that by saying the US is measuring a large volume of both very high and very low students so there is still sufficient numbers of students being produced (approx 33% of the world’s leading scientists come from the US). Tietelbaum recognises that

“science and engineering occupations are at the leading edge of economic competitiveness in an increasingly globalised world, and science and entering workforces of sufficient size and quality are essential for any 21st century economy to prosper.”

His main gripe is that there is no data to back up claims of a nationwide crisis in STEM and that this crisis truism is misallocating public funding and attention.

 

My thoughts:

At this stage I believe I am reading variations on the same article. Despite this I am still looking for answers on why large numbers of mid career IT workers are unemployed. Also, if economic data on graduate unemployment is demonstrating there is no STEM crisis then perhaps its time to turn out attention to STEM related K-12 performance. In short – I see true value in broadening students understanding of computational thinking, programming, logic and other STEM related fields at a young age however I do not expect this to translate directly into the number of Australian’s employed in STEM fields (as defined by government statistics). I’m still operating on the belief that we need to prepare a future generation for jobs that don’t exist yet – and that giving them a broad based education is the best way to do this.