On Should I Teach My Kids to Code

Nicole Laporte writes on her own miserable experience being pushed to code as a child and whether she should now teach her kids to code.

The digital literacy movement is taking off and there are a range of companies, startups, not-for-profits and government initiatives trying to encourage young people to take up coding. It’s as if, by introducing coding at a young age, we can trick kids into learning something naturally that can be challenging for adults. This approach to coding is similar to how some parents approach languages – if kids grow up in a bilingual household they take for granted a skill that most adults have to work to develop.

Getting back to kids and coding – there are a couple of debates happening at the same time.

• The first is whether everyone does need to code. The glib response is that not everyone needs to be a builder – you just call one when you need one. To which I say – there is no greater feeling than knowing how to do something yourself. Plus, knowing what a builder is actually doing helps you develop your project scope, understand their strengths and limitations and advise knowledgeably if needed.
• A second argument is that not everyone is good at coding – which is fine, but at least they know what it is.
• A third – is age 5 too young? Shouldn’t they be outside playing? I agree with this to a certain point. Kids and coding should be treated the same way as kids and maths. It is important to to introduce to young people but should not be all consuming. The difference is that kids are fascinated by mobiles/tablets – then it comes back to a parenting issue of ensuring the tykes have time away from technology.

Laporte doesn’t really come to a conclusion on whether she should teach her kids code. Her article is more a discussion on the difficulty of making kids and code both accessible, educational and interesting.

On Four Ways to Make Australia More Innovative

In September 2013 Patrick Llewellyn, CEO of 99designs, the world’s largest graphic design marketplace, published his thoughts on four ways to make Australia more competitive.

Llewellyn’s ideas include:

• Education reform: if kids love tablets and phones so much, why aren’t we teaching them to make games and apps. Start in primary school, teach the key ideas of computer science, computational thinking, and learning to program.
• Celebrate entrepreneurs: the US treats its tech giants as heroes – can Australia do the same for the founders of SEEK, Atlassian, 99designs and a range of investors.
• Welcome skilled migrants: using Israel as an example of where humanitarian issues (the desire for a Jewish homeland), immigration and economic interests combined to create a successful culture of innovation. Australia is in a position to open its immigration policy up to similar reforms.
• Inject infrastructure: build the National Broadband Network, both as a solid piece of infrastructure and a symbol that the government understands the need for tech investment to link Australia to the world.

Sounds like a plan.

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.

On Australia’s ICT Workforce Study (AWPA, 2013)

In July 2013, the Commonwealth Government’s Australian Workplace and Productivity Agency (AWPA) released the ICT Workforce Study – a 169 page review of Australia’s tech workforce, where its headed and the challenges it faces.

Here’s an extracted summary of chapter two regarding challenges Australia needs to address to meet future ICT skills demands:

• The ICT workforce is predominantly young and male. Participation rates of women and mature-aged workers are low. The potential to engage Indigenous Australians and people with disability also remains untapped.
• High drop-out rates from tertiary courses, and graduates reporting difficulty finding employment, are causes of concern. Skilled and temporary (subclass 457 visa) migration programs are a key source of supply for the ICT sector since the mid-1990s and continue to play a significant role in addressing the demand for specialist skills not available in Australia.
• Third, employers find it hard to quickly recruit suitable candidates for job openings. Employers increasingly demand professionals with both broad knowledge and deep expertise, including technical skills, domain knowledge and soft skills which include communication and business skills. Employer demand for experienced workers means that there are fewer entry-level positions available for new graduates.

This gives a fairly accurate state of play of skills and employment at the upper tertiary/people- with-jobs level. What I like about this report is that it recognises the difficulties in capturing ICT workforce data – that old chestnut: is an accountant working for a tech firm considered part of the sector? What about a tech IP lawyer? What about a tech entrepreneur that outsources development?

Some other interesting insights:

Recent recruitment data for key ICT occupations indicates that while there are often adequate numbers of applicants for advertised vacancies, employers often considered many applicants unsuitable for the positions. For instance, data from DEEWR’s Survey of Employers Who Have Recently Advertised indicates about 10% of applicants in three ICT occupations—ICT Business Analyst, Systems Analyst and Analyst Programmer—were suitable for the positions advertised, and for Developer Programmer and Software Engineer positions only 5% of applicants were suitable. …(edited) reasons given: a) new entrants don’t have enough experience (in years) and b) applicants often lack soft skills. In some occupations, such as Software Engineer and Developer Programmer, client liaison and ‘cultural fit’ with the enterprise are considered critical when assessing applicants for positions.

This is a tough one – recruitment data indicates that Australia has enough ICT workers – its just that they are not the right type nor have diverse enough life experiences/soft skills. There are a couple of suggestions in the wind as to where the solution lies – the most common one is to increase total volume of tech educated workers. This sets off a discussion on the reasons why the volume of Australian’s enrolling in tertiary computer science degrees has declined (and it has, a drop of 36% since 2001 – but a slight improvement on 2008 when it was down to 50%). This winds its way back to primary school experiences – the idea that students have roughly formed their career ‘personalities’ by about the age of 8.

I’m sure I’ll post more on this.

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.

The STEM Crisis is a Myth – part 2

Article: The STEM Crisis: Myth or Reality? (Michael Anf, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2013)

I thought I’d continue my review of the STEM crisis counter argument. Today I’m looking at Michael Anf’s 2013 article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The strongest point of Anf’s anti-‘STEM crisis’ claim is the idea that if skills were in short supply then wages would increase as employers fought for the best and the brightest. The main source of this line of thinking is Michael S Teitelbaum, a reseacher and frequent writer on this subject. [nb. Teitelbaum was also referenced in the IEEE Spectrum article I reviewed earlier this week.] Anf’s own counter to this argument is that the globalised nature of tech work and its ability to place work in the area that offers the best skills/wages is what’s keeping USA STEM wages stable/low. This creates a circular logic that suggests that this model of globalised skills sourcing is a good thing while at the same time companies are struggling to reach new markets because of the lack of domestically skilled (and client facing) engineers and analysts.

That’s roughly the extent of Anf’s arguments suggesting there is no STEM crisis. There are other interesting points raised in the article but they mainly question whether the attention being paid to this issue is the result of successful lobbying of government by universities and tech companies in order to secure funding for STEM education support programs. I don’t necessarily believe that an issue is not valid just because someone is effective at raising attention to their cause. Sometimes those people are the most informed – other times they are acting in their own self interest.

Anf’s other points:

• Tech as entrepreneurship: Anf suggests the STEM crisis narrative is being supported, and acted upon, because technology and engineering are the means by which people ‘make and do’ things in the 21st century. These are essential foundation skills for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs are the great white hope of countries responding to stagnant jobs growth (caused by globalised economies and the decline of domestic manufacturing and primary resources markets). I’ll support that argument. However Anf draws a distinction between the future earning potential of an Information Technology worker and other STEM disciplines such as those that are biologists, chemists, electrical engineers, manufacturing workers, mechanical engineers, or physicists. Maybe tech workers have more flexibility than chemists?
• False motives: the article also suggests that major tech companies benefit from an increase in STEM workers (and I’m defaulting to my particular interest in IT programmers). Anti-‘STEM Crisis’ proponents argue that the increased numbers of workers keep wages low. Tech companies can continue to pick the best and the brightest without the ongoing responsibility of training older workers as they move out of flavour. This is important as tech moves fast. “Norman S. Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California, has investigated how IT employers benefit by raising the numbers of lower-paid foreign STEM laborers and by sending offshore the engineering and STEM manufacturing jobs of mostly older American workers.” (Anf, 2013). That could be interesting to follow-up on however I don’t believe it negates the overall narrative that says our world needs more people in the STEM space.
• STEM workers change careers: About half the USA’s STEM university graduates have left STEM related jobs within ten years of graduating. Anf takes this to mean that people don’t like their jobs. I take it to mean that STEM skills are relevant in other areas of the economy. This could be a case of statistics getting in the way of a good story. We have previously seen challenges in measuring STEM workers (ie is an accountant at a tech firm a STEM employee? – government says yes). I’m not sure how these statistics would measure data scientists working at a financial institution or security experts working for an infrastructure firm. I don’t believe this career movement is related to an oversupply of educated STEM workers – I see it as someone using their skills in new fields.
• International Workers: Up until now the USA has been able to rely on the brightest minds emigrating to the USA for a better quality of life and more interesting jobs. Irma Becerra-Fernandez, vice president for engagement at Florida International University, believes that idea will change as other countries have rapidly improved their own standards of living and have caught up to the US in other areas of technical expertise. I’d argue that the US is still a very attractive place to work however perhaps that is fading.
• Recruiting mismatches: the article says that the skills shortages are real. Quote: “The problem is that employers and would-be workers don’t always match up well, whether because of geography or a worker’s level of specific skills, or because companies—merged, downsized, or otherwise hunkered down during the recession—aren’t reaching out to college grads and others effectively enough.” (Anf 2013).

My Conclusion:

The main point I pull from Anf’s article is that we should not panic over the shortage of workers. He, among others, reminds us that STEM crisis statistics are being generated by tech companies and universities with a vested interest in directing funding towards the number of skilled workers in that area. While people generally agree that students with a solid grounding in STEM have more life options – no-one has given me a satisfactory response to the question of what is happening to the previous generation of skilled IT workers – the ones who are losing their jobs to overseas competition (with lower wages).

Throughout this discussion we’re still falling back on the idea that we are future proofing a generation – we don’t know what jobs will be created in the coming 20 years, however we have a strong belief that they will involve technology – whether its making the tech yourself or needing to work with the people that the tech.

This closing quote comes from David Hart, director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy, at George Mason University

“…Combining STEM knowledge with humanities knowledge would be ideal. If you can train an engineer to solve problems and operate in a complicated environment, you’ve done something important.”