How does your research contribute to an understanding of STEM education and careers?


We hope that we are part of a trend to more attention to the experiences of STEM workers, and for those interested only in STEM education, we hope that they see these work lives as a continuation of education. After all, very large percentages are still learning, education continues—it’s just not necessarily in school anymore.


Policymakers who want to grow the STEM workforce need to pay attention to this learning, as we suspect that keeping up with technology changes is part of the reason that even with our more expansive understanding of STEM jobs, there are still about 30 percent of people who spent all of this time and money getting STEM degrees who are not even using those skills. Training to keep up may become too difficult over time, especially with family pressures that are common later in careers. pgslot


We also show that policymakers and scholars will be wise to pay more attention to what constitutes the STEM workforce. It seems simple until we look more closely. A lot of the jobs that show up on our list of jobs that workers say require STEM expertise but do not appear in National Science Foundation or many other lists of STEM occupations are in management, medical/health fields, science teaching and accounting. We need to be very clear about what we want to maximize when we encourage more and more students to study STEM subjects, and what we want to count as a STEM worker. If we care about innovation, for example, we should understand that STEM-capable managers will help that effort, STEM teachers educate the next generation of innovators, and that physicians can easily lend their expertise to drug development.


We also contribute by shining a light on these STEM graduates who have totally left STEM, and no longer use STEM expertise on the job. Anyone interested in American economic competitiveness should be interested why these people left the jobs in science and engineering for which they were trained, and given their tendency to boredom at work, how we can better use their skill sets.