The Fictitious STEM Skills Gap

by George Lorenzo

Finally, finally, finally I found an article that confirms what I have been saying for a couple years now but have not taken out the time to prove it unequivocally – that the so-called skills gap in STEM-related jobs does not exist. The article was written by Robert N. Charette in IEEE Spectrum, titled “The STEM Crisis is a Myth.” 

Charette certainly did his homework for this excellent piece, citing one study after another that proved his point that “there is indeed a STEM crisis—just not the one everyone’s been talking about. The real STEM crisis is one of literacy: the fact that today’s students are not receiving a solid grounding in science, math, and engineering.”

Back in July of last year, in a blog for Training Industry, Inc., I wrote a post titled “Is there or Is There Not a Skills Gap?” And then a month later I followed up with “The Skills Gap Revisited.”  In any event, in numerous other articles and through my own personal interviews, people are still insisting that there is a skills gap, and I have been unable to convince people otherwise. I think that, number one, employers have created this false issue to keep salaries down. And/or, number two, they simply don’t have human resources people who really know how to find the right job candidates. All those stats out of Manpower and others about the STEM skills gap don’t carry much weight when you consider those two theories.

Charette, of course, makes a much stronger great case to support my beliefs than I could.  Despite what employers and HR people have been saying, here are only four reasons that Charette used to prove that a STEM skills gap does not exist (there were many more):

• Wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000.
• Every year U.S. schools grant more STEM degrees than there are available jobs.
• More than 370 000 science and engineering jobs in the United States were lost in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren’t working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available.
  
  So, read the article; please comment, and let us know what you think.