Researchers explore the physiological mechanisms of aging with the ultimate goal of improving healthspan.
Published March 11, 2020
By Hallie Kapner
When mechanical engineer Carlotta Mummolo, neurobiologist Eleni Gourgou, and neuroscientist Teppei Matsui were teamed up in the Interstellar Initiative — an international mentorship program for early-career investigators — their first task was finding common ground.
Eleni Gourgou, PhD University of Michigan
“We have such diverse backgrounds that I initially joked we were speaking different languages,” Mummolo said. “Overcoming that challenge was fun and exciting, and with the help of our mentors, we found a research direction that unites our expertise.”
Organized around the theme of Healthy Longevity, the workshops challenged researchers to develop a plan for exploring the physiological mechanisms of aging, with the ultimate goal of using their findings to improve healthspan, or the time during which a person is healthy.
We spoke with the winning team about their forthcoming grant proposal, the importance of international collaboration, and their advice for young scientists.
Describe the area of research your team is pursuing.
Carlotta Mummolo, PhD New Jersey Institute of Technology
Teppei Matsui, PhD, University of Tokyo: We chose to focus on age-dependent changes in the relationship between motor behavior and cognitive behavior.
Eleni Gourgou, PhD, University of Michigan: Carlotta is an engineer and roboticist whose work mostly focuses on humans, Teppei is an expert in brain imaging in rodents, and I study neurobiology using roundworms as a model system. These organisms are very different when it comes to the complexity of the nervous system, behavior, and how they experience aging. We looked at the questions we’re addressing in our own research, then tried to find a common thread that allows us to use three different organisms as three different approaches to address the same target. That thread turned out to be locomotion and cognition.
TM: By bringing this problem to the abstract level— motor behavior versus cognitive behavior as a function of age—we can study different animals within the same framework.
Carlotta Mummolo, PhD, New Jersey Institute of Technology: This is the novelty of our project, because assessments of motor and cognitive performance are usually done separately. But we wanted to integrate them and look for a methodology that translates across species.
EG: The final research proposal is still taking shape. We will continue to work on it, then submit it to an international funding agency.
Mentorship by senior scientists is central to the Interstellar Initiative–how have your team’s mentors shaped this experience?
Teppei Matsui, PhD University of Tokyo
CM: For early-career scientists, mentorship is everything, and that’s true even more so in this case. Our mentors—Frank Kirchhoff of the University of Saarland and Haruhiko Bito of the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Medicine—pushed us to broaden our mindsets and step out of our comfort zone to find a unified approach. We’d also like to thank mentors Lawrence Hunter, Sofiya Milman, Mahendra Rao, Ikue Mori, and Meng Wan for helping shape our research idea.
TM: Mentorship is very important, and Interstellar Initiative mentors are prominent researchers who have experience with both obtaining competitive grants and reviewing grants. In the first meeting, we received valuable advice about to make our project more appealing and convincing to grant reviewers.
CM: One of our mentors told us something that I’ve kept in mind throughout this project—she told us to focus on integration, innovation, and impact. That was very helpful.
How can international collaborations help further scientific careers and scientific discovery?
TM: Biology is becoming a “big science” these days, and it is necessary to form a big team of experts to do cutting-edge science. For small countries like Japan, it can be difficult to find experts within the country.
EG: International collaboration isn’t new to most of us, but the way we collaborate in the context of the Interstellar Initiative is very different. Many of us have different professional backgrounds and training, and the concept of collaboration doesn’t have the same meaning for everyone. There are cultures of collaboration that you have to integrate in order to work together, and this is something I may not have experienced if it wasn’t for the Interstellar Initiative. It was a great, eye-opening experience for me.
CM: When you exchange ideas with people from different backgrounds, you never know what could come from the conversation. Sometimes that’s how very interesting scientific ideas come about.
What advice can you offer to young scientists?
CM: Step out of your comfort zone! Don’t be afraid, and don’t hold back when you have opportunities to do things outside of your field or your usual mindset.
EG: There’s always something to learn from people—from peers and mentors, of course, but also from people in earlier stages of their careers. Their perspective might shed light on a different aspect of our own work.
TM: I’d encourage young scientists to apply for the Interstellar Initiative.
Organic chemist Steven Townsend of Vanderbilt University explains his research on human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) and their role in developing babies’ microbiome and preventing infection.
Published January 30, 2020
By Marie Gentile and Roger Torda
It is well understood that human milk provides numerous benefits to babies as they develop, particularly in its ability to help protect babies from a variety of infections. But what is the mechanism that is doing the work to help keep babies healthy?
Organic chemist Professor Steven Townsend of Vanderbilt University speaks to us about his research on human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) and their role in developing babies’ microbiome and preventing infection. He also discusses the importance of sharing his science with the general public.
Your work has focused on human milk oligosaccharides. Can you explain what these are and why they are important for an infant’s health?
Oligosaccharide is the scientific term for sugar. Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) are the complex sugars that are present in human milk, but not in cow’s milk. In human milk, there are about 200 oligosaccharides. By analogy, cow’s milk only contains small quantities of about 30 to 40 oligosaccharides.
HMOs increase the health of the infant in a number of ways. These molecules selectively feed commensal (good bacteria) over bad bacteria. They also protect against bacterial infection by mimicking molecules that pathogenic bacteria use to attach to the gut – the HMOs bind to these pathogens instead and remove them from the system. Recently my group has discovered that these compounds also have intrinsic antimicrobial activity – they actually inhibit the growth of pathogenic bacteria.
Steven D. Townsend, PhD Assistant Professor of Chemistry Vanderbilt University
Together, these factors mean that the microbiome of a breastfed infant is selectively engineered to have more commensal species present, outnumbering pathogens and potential pathogens.
How did you become interested in the biology of human milk?
My interest in human milk first struck when my wife and I were walking through Harlem one day. We saw some advertisements for infant formula. In many parts of the world it’s actually illegal to advertise formula, but here in a poor neighborhood in New York City, were formula advertisements. If you go downtown to the East 50s, a more affluent neighborhood, you don’t see any formula advertisements, you see advertisements for breastfeeding. I wanted to know why breastfed babies are typically healthier.
How does human milk differ from formula?
When it comes to milk broadly, the main constituent macromolecule is typically lactose, a sugar (carbohydrate). Most bigger animals also have a lot of protein in their milk, usually one third of the macromolecules, but human milk is different, as only about 6% of the macromolecules are proteins. For human babies and primate babies, it’s more important for our brains to develop faster than our body, which requires more carbohydrates.
Primate milk has a large quantity of complex sugars with a variety of activities – some of the sugars are involved in brain development and some of them are involved in the development of the immune system. Interestingly, we know that for many of these sugars, the baby does not get calories from them, even though they consume grams of them per day. It turns out that the sugars are actually fermented by bacteria in the gut. These sugars are selectively consumed by good bacteria to give them a growth advantage over bad bacteria. Therefore, if they are not present in formula, then formula-fed babies are going to be at a slight health disadvantage.
Are there any other uses for HMOs besides in the development of an infant’s biome?
There are a lot of companies attempting to put HMOs into different food products, for both infants and adults. For example – some companies are trying to develop products for irritable bowel syndrome and other illnesses that are related to a screwed up microbiome.
In my group, we are investigating if HMOs can help antibiotics work more effectively. Many antibiotics have been mis- and over-used and a lot of them are no longer effective. Our research is finding that co-dosing certain antibiotics with human milk sugars results in a synergistic effect – they work together, which means that you can ultimately use less of the antibiotic to kill a bacteria. That’s cool because antibiotics have a lot of negative side effects, but HMOs don’t have side effects.
You often describe yourself as a humanist. How does this inform your scientific research?
When I say I’m a humanist, I mean I care about people’s day-to-day wellbeing.
The humanist part of me is enhanced by communicating the results of our research with the public and getting feedback on different directions that we could pursue. We’re getting a lot of good project ideas from talking to a broad range of people. It’s very important to me that the general public understand the science we’re doing at a fundamental level because they fund it—I think we owe it to them to explain the research we’re doing and get their feedback.
By Marie Gentile, Richard Birchard, and Mandy Carr
Speakers from left to right: Sam Parnia, MD, PhD (Director of Critical Care & Resuscitation Research at the NYU School of Medicine), Sarah Perman, MD (University of Colorado School of Medicine), Tom Aufderheide, MD, MS, FACEP, FACC, FAHA (Medical College of Wisconsin), Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD (University of California, Riverside), and Stephan Mayer, MD, FCCM (Wayne State School of Medicine)
We see it in television dramas all the time—a patient in cardiac arrest is rushed into the ER after a severe traumatic injury or medical emergency, with a staff of medical professionals frantically performing CPR. Tension is high and doctors have to figure out how to save the person’s life. Beyond the theatrics of primetime drama, the field of medicine has been making major strides to reverse cardiac arrest and death.
In this video you’ll hear directly from top physicians and researchers who are at the cutting edge of resuscitation science. Moderated by Sam Parnia, this discussion brought together internationally-recognized researcher in emergency cardiac care, Tom Aufderheide; distinguished happiness research psychologist, Sonja Lyubomirsky; world expert in neurological intensive care Stephan Mayer; and Sarah Perman, a leader in resuscitation science and post-cardiac arrest care.
Learning how to craft a scientific paper so that it is accepted for publication takes practice. An expert provides his perspective.
Published October 1, 2019
By Douglas Braaten, PhD
Learning how to craft a scientific paper so that it is accepted for publication takes practice. It also requires attention to details across many domains. Many advice resources are available, and I encourage any young scientist to carve out time to focus on what to do — and what to avoid — when writing scientific papers.
Before starting to write, give some thought to preparation, process, attitude and goal. Some key points I’ve learned from reading and editing hundreds of papers at Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences and Nature Immunology follow.
These two journals have very different aims, scope and readership, but similar goals of publishing well-written, well-constructed papers for the sake of readers’ understanding and clarity. Note the points below are not presented in order of importance or temporality — all are useful.
Preparation
Part of the preparation is learning as much as possible about scientific publishing in general which will help to make the process both more enjoyable and successful.
The writing of a scientific paper begins when a lot of hard work has been done already. Completion of a series of experiments that demonstrate a statistically relevant discovery is the foundation of all good scientific papers.
That’s not to suggest that one can’t have a reasonably clear picture of what a paper might look like along the way of performing experiments. Indeed, designing experiments — the order and what’s required — is often critically informed by one’s experience in crafting a good scientific paper.
However, it’s never a good idea to start before a complete set of experimental results has been gathered. Doing so can reverse the circle from “now that I have a set of data how best can it be presented?” to “what experiments do I need to do to finish my paper?” the latter being the wrong way around.
Don’t get caught in the trap of needing to do an experiment in order to finish a paper. Instead, set out to perform the complete set of experiments necessary for readers (in particular peer reviewers!) to agree with you that the conclusions are supported by the data. And then write.
Process
Consider who will need to read your paper before it is accepted for publication.
Among the best papers I’ve read are those that have been prepared for a particular journal and its readership. Writing to achieve those goals may not seem as important as simply describing the data. It’s critical, however, to write for readers and to prepare a paper with specific audiences in mind. These two points are often ignored. The journal editors must find it suitable for their journal, believe a given paper presents good data, and does so clearly enough to send it out for peer review. Next, while the process of peer review can vary among journals, papers at most journals are sent to at least two external peer reviewers. These individuals — very busy scientists, often pressed for time and overloaded with work — volunteer their time to comment on papers.
More than anything, peer reviewers hate papers that are overly long, vague and not crafted for readers. By accepting to review a paper, reviewers by and large give benefit to any doubt that it presents interesting information and data. Give them what they want without distractions.
Reviewers and editors are busy individuals — don’t hobble yourself by ignoring the fact that they can be easily put off by sloppy and careless writing.
Attitude
Some of the above considerations of process are also considerations of attitude. It’s critical for authors to set and maintain a level of respect and collegiality for everyone involved when preparing and submitting a scientific paper — from submission, to peer review, production and every step through publication.
In my experience, the most successful authors are those whose attitude reflects the ideals of both achievement of work and an earnest, genuine desire to share important new information with the scientific community.
In contrast to that, an attitude of entitlement to be published is immediately noticeable to editors and, especially, to peer reviewers. I have seen good papers that may have only needed minor improvements as recommended by reviewers, upended by rejection because the authors believed they were in the right and didn’t need to make changes.
Even the most experienced scientists know it’s their responsibility to maintain an open, respectful attitude during the publishing process. Ignoring this imperils your aims for little more than an overly needy ego. Consider it a privilege to have your scientific paper evaluated and published.
Goal
Much of the above could have been included in a discussion of scientific author goals. The right preparation, a well-considered process, and a collegial and respectful attitude are certainly worthy goals.
Less obvious, yet equally important is considering the audience from the perspective of readers who want Open Access (OA). The interest in scientific papers to be OA is now so intense that it’s important for authors to consider OA for every one of their papers.
Indeed, so many funders are pushing for not only OA, but for other forms of pre- and post-publication access to scientific data that it behooves every author to consider both the laudable goals of OA and the ramifications for scientific publishing. Fortunately, many online forums present extensive discussions — e.g. oaspa.org.
As the OA movement grows — and there’s no doubt that it will — authors must consider whether they will submit only to OA journals to support the goal of open information. At the same time, they should consider that publishers of OA journals will feel increasing pressure to seek more and more submissions to cover their publication costs as subscription revenue declines. Authors will surely experience this increasing pressure, as it will undoubtedly affect the publishing process.
For example, more papers to evaluate increases the burdens on everyone involved — editors, reviewers, production staff. Ensuring you do all that you can as a responsible scientific author will likely help achieve your personal aims of publishing and of contributing openly to scientific progress. And while much more can be said about how to publish successfully, keeping in mind preparation, process, attitude and your goal should help.
Dr. Kastner brings people together to leverage complementary strengths and achieve a common goal.
Published October 1, 2019
By Marie Samanovic Golden, PhD
Daniel L. Kastner, MD, PhD, Scientific Director for the Intramural Research Program at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), received the 2019 Ross Prize in Molecular Medicine — an honor established by The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and the Springer Nature journal Molecular Medicine — for his pioneering work on the genomics of auto-inflammatory diseases.
Dr. Daniel Kastner (right) with colleague Dr. David Beck (left)
“The Ross Prize is the most memorable, exciting, rewarding prize that I have ever received,” declared Kastner.
In the 1990s, Dr. Kastner led an international consortium that identified the gene responsible for familial Mediterranean fever (FMF), a rare inherited disorder characterized by recurrent fevers and severe inflammation.
What makes Dr. Kastner unique is that he is a master in bringing people together, helping them to leverage complementary strengths and achieve a common goal. This manifested in the international FMF consortium, comprising six groups with a total of 46 collaborators located in Israel, Australia and four centers around the United States.
“Ideal collaborations are win-win propositions,” said Kastner, and “trust is the currency of the realm.”
Advances in Autoinflammatory Disease Research
The endeavor was a resounding success. It also laid the groundwork for the identification of the tumor necrosis factor receptor-associated periodic syndrome (TRAPS), a second periodic fever syndrome beside FMF, which led to the novel concept of an emerging family of autoinflammatory diseases.
Inflammation is now thought to play an important role in a number of rare monogenic diseases akin to FMF and TRAPS, as well in more common and genetically complex diseases like gout.
Colleagues of Dr. Kastner, like Dr. Luke O’Neil from Trinity College Dublin, take the bold position that addressing inflammation could impact any number of ailments. Certainly it is the case that inflammation plays an important role in several common diseases such as atherosclerosis and cancer. However, “the inflammatory process is a double-edged sword” warned Kastner.
Indeed, dampening patients’ autoinflammatory diseases with anti-inflammatory agents brings them to a normal, base-level of immunity — and may even be protective against other inflammation-mediated disorders. But in most individuals, a blanket prescription of anti-inflammatories could prevent their immune systems from performing its most basic and necessary function: fighting off microbial infections.
Developing the Clinical Infrastructure
Looking ahead, Dr. Kastner developed a clinical infrastructure at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to examine patients with undiagnosed inflammatory diseases, using genetics to identify the cause of rare diseases and autoinflammatory disorders. As of 2019, the inflammatory diseases section has seen over 2,000 patients, referred from around the world. This prolific program led to the identification of more than 15 new diseases, and over half of them now have effective therapies.
Treatments for these diseases, such as cytokine inhibitors or JAK-kinase inhibitors, target the molecular pathways involved, but are only effective for as long as patients take them. Thus, curative measures such as bone-marrow transplants, or potentially gene therapy, are attractive to patients and their families. But these are not without risk, advised Kastner.
For inflammatory diseases caused by mutations in white blood cells, bone marrow transplants are appealing and logical in lieu of a lifetime of treatment. However, depending on the clinical circumstances, this measure may come with a significant mortality rate, he explained.
Weighing the Risk-Benefits
It is difficult to justify such risk if patients are responding to effective drugs such as colchicine (for the control of FMF), with no reported long-term side effects in the last 50 years. Dr. Kastner is constantly working to weigh these risk-benefits with his patients.
Dr. Kastner shared that he owes a debt of gratitude to Dr. Robert Rich, his first research mentor at Baylor College of Medicine, who not only allowed him, but also expected him to follow his interests independently as a young scientist. Dr. Rich also urged him to go back to medical school after his PhD, to apply his new knowledge to the care of patients.
Kastner continues this tradition, constantly moving between the bench and the bedside in his continued quest to understand inflammatory disease.
Efforts to close the gender gap in STEM by encouraging girls to study science have resulted in more young women considering careers in science. Yet systemic biases in academia create an uncertain future.
Published October 1, 2019
By Sonya Dougal, PhD
Many women who earn PhDs in life sciences choose to pursue non-academic careers during the critical period between receiving their doctoral degree and becoming an independent investigator. This gender specific phenomenon, described as a “leaky pipeline,” is a significant source of brain drain for academic and biomedical research.
Anne L. Taylor, MD, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
A Biased Culture
Overt bias against women in the sciences is less common today than in decades past, but implicit bias remains a major challenge for male and female scientists alike.
According to Virginia Valian, distinguished professor at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center and director of the Hunter College Gender Equity Project, bias, whether conscious or not, shapes attitudes and behavior.
“The traits that are perceived to be better for science are those we often ascribe to men, such as independence and a focus on the task at hand, while women are nurturant, communal and express their feelings,” Valian said. “These gender schemas can impact reality, such that women’s achievements are systematically slightly under-acknowledged and men’s are slightly over-acknowledged.”
The Impact of Implicit Bias on Hiring Decisions
A slew of research studies examining the impact of implicit bias on hiring decisions and career advancement, conference presentations, manuscript authorship and grant funding, confirm Valian’s assertion. For example, in a 2012 study from Yale University, 100 male and female faculty members at top research institutions reviewed an identical resume for a hypothetical lab position with one change — the applicant was either a man or a woman. The resume bearing a man’s name was favored over the same resume with a woman’s name. Male candidates were perceived as more competent and offered higher salaries, while female candidates were rated as more likeable.
Navigating the transition from graduate school or postdoctoral researcher to independent investigator hinges largely on funding, and this too is an area rife with inequalities. While women receive grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at about the same rate as their male peers, first-time female PIs are funded at comparatively lower levels.
A further consequence of implicit bias is that female professors do more of the service work within departments — taking on additional teaching responsibilities and serving on committees. While this work is essential, it does not support the attainment of federal and foundation grant funding needed to advance to academic leadership positions, nor is it valued during tenure review.
Not Just Women’s Work
The difficulties of juggling career and family demands have especially stark repercussions in the scientific workforce. A surprising 43 percent of women scientists — and nearly 25 percent of men — transition to part-time employment or leave their careers altogether after having their first child, according to Cech & Blair-Loy’s 2019 study of the impact of parenthood on STEM careers. In response, some institutions have implemented policies to address retention of both women and men.
“Having children should not be a permanent impediment to advancement,” said Ann Taylor, MD, vice dean of academic affairs at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. “Yet when women lessen their workload to accommodate their family responsibilities, we don’t do a good job putting them back on the path to leadership.”
Taylor believes that gender-neutral policies at Columbia, such as 13 weeks of paid leave for primary caregivers and an extra year on the tenure clock for each child, “really help support careers,” but acknowledges that some difficulties are harder to address. Grant funds often come with strict timelines, posing challenges for women and men who temporarily trim their work responsibilities during the early years of family life.
“You don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘I’m going to take this three-year grant and make it a six-year grant,’” Taylor said. “These are problems we have to solve, and we are actively thinking about how to do that.”
Creating the systemic, institutional change that Taylor and others envision requires support from male STEM professionals as well. Neuroscientist Paul Greengard — who was Vincent Astor Professor at The Rockefeller University until his death last year — was an early advocate for gender equality in academia.
“There’s absolutely no evidence one way or another as to whether there’s a difference between the sexes in terms of creativity, the most important parameter of scientific discovery,” Greengard said in an interview with The Rockefeller University in 2016.
Establishing a Preeminent Annual Prize for Women in STEM
When he won the Nobel Prize in 2000, Greengard donated his share of the honorarium to establish the preeminent annual prize for women in science — The Pearl Meister Greengard Prize. Named for Dr. Greengard’s mother, the prize sparked a robust program of advocacy and fundraising to support women scientists at Rockefeller. Aaron Mertz, director of the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program and a former postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller, served as the vice president of the professional development group WISeR (Women in Science at Rockefeller).
“Men must be active contributors to discussions about gender equality, and have a significant role in creating a scientific environment in which women can flourish,” he said. “I firmly believe that women’s issues are men’s issues.”
Without men at the table, institutional change will not happen.
The New York Academy of Sciences is committed to a diverse balance of program speakers.
If You Can’t See It, You Can’t Be It
A culture of mentoring is vital in business — including guidance on salary negotiation, self-promotion and other skills necessary to advance in competitive fields — yet this type of support is a relative newcomer to academia. For early and mid-career women scientists, direction from senior colleagues can mean the difference between choosing an alternative career path and advancing to leadership positions.
Critically, Taylor highlighted that “the nature of mentorship can vary. Women are more likely to have mentorship that involves psychosocial support and are not provided with tactical career development strategies.” Columbia recently augmented their leadership and management programs to address the needs of women and diverse faculty by making both types of mentoring available for all faculty members, along with initiatives to ensure salary parity and timely promotions.
Men have so outnumbered women in scientific conference programs that a new word — manels — to describe all-male panels has entered the scientific lexicon. Feminist and activist Marie Wilson popularized the notion “if you can’t see it, you can’t be it” to encourage women’s leadership as role models.
To raise the visibility of women scientists, the New York Academy of Sciences requires gender parity among conference speakers. Forty-five percent of the speakers in the Academy’s 2018-2019 programming cycle were women, with an organizational goal of reaching 50 percent in the coming year.
Recently, NIH director Francis Collins released a statement indicating that he would decline participation at scientific conferences where “inclusiveness was not evident in the agenda,” writing that these parameters should include women and underrepresented groups. Conference organizers striving to meet that mandate may turn to Request a Woman Scientist, a database created by the 500 Women Scientists initiative — an organization galvanizing public support for STEM diversity and equality. In less than one year, more than 9,000 women scientists from 133 countries have added their profiles.
The Challenge Ahead
A 2018 paper by Lerchenmueller & Sorenson of the Yale School of Management noted that, “Rather than women dripping out of the STEM career pipe every centimeter along the way, they appear to pour out at one of the critical junctures.” This metaphor suggests that the first step to gender equality is raising awareness of the pressure points in women scientists’ careers such as the transition between trainee and independent investigator.
The path forward will require collective action between universities, government agencies and funders to remove systemic barriers and biases. Momentum is building for those willing to make the effort. As Taylor emphasized, “Equity and justice is work every single day.”
Today’s employers want workers who have “soft skills,” such as being a good listener or thinking critically.
Published October 1, 2019
By Pinelopi Kyriazi
Joseph Borrello, Sinai Bio-Design, Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
According to a new report from Cengage, an educational technology and services company, employers want college graduates who have “soft skills,” such as being a good listener or thinking critically, but they have difficulty finding such candidates.
Such so-called “soft” skills are highly sought after by employers, yet they tend to be given short shrift in academic settings. As a result, while science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) professionals receive extensive training on technical skills, their non-STEM skills tend to be underdeveloped.
Nevertheless, a growing body of evidence shows that soft skills are an indicator for future employment and earnings compared to technical and manual skills. Hence, a gap has been created between which skills employers are looking for, and which skills STEM job candidates provide. From running a productive lab to leading a research team, a successful career for scientists hinges on their ability to communicate and collaborate, often with teams that may be in other departments, other institutions or even other countries.
Developing Skills in Persuasive Writing, Management
Take grant writing. Competition for a shrinking pool of funding is fierce, so academic scientists need to tell a cohesive and evidence-based story from complicated data to grab the attention of reviewers and secure funding.
Translating complex content in a simple and easy to understand manner is not a skill frequently practiced until scientists earn their first academic job. By this point, stress is high as job security often rests on their ability to earn grants to continue their research.
Similarly, managing a team of graduate students or post-doctoral trainees is a daunting task for a new professor. On top of all that, many have a heavy teaching load, making their time and project management skills essential to their productivity.
Nida Rehmani Lotus STEMM
Technical Skills: The Great Decline
A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, explored the shifting demand for workforce skills from now until 2030. They found that technological advancements, including automation and artificial intelligence, are changing the types of tasks employees are performing.
As people increasingly interact with machines, there is a greater need for technological skills, social and emotional skills and higher cognitive skills. These include creativity, complex information processing, empathy, critical thinking and communication. People are still outperforming machines on such skills, but machines are generally much better at repetitive tasks with explicit rules requiring physical or manual labor.
The Impact of Automation
Historically, technological advancement has created new types of work while some occupations become outdated. According to the McKinsey report, while the internet eliminated many jobs, new positions emerged in computer programming, application development, social media marketing and search engine optimization.
Science is undergoing a similar pattern, with mundane tasks such as repetitive data collection and replication becoming more dependent on automation. Scientists are improving their technological skills such as coding complex algorithmic models, interpreting multi-dimensional data and managing big data sets.
Social skills are also becoming more prevalent as teamwork and communication required for intricate experiments is growing. Lab sizes are increasing and scientists at various training levels — from undergraduate students to early career researchers — must work together to complete large scale projects.
Scientists in Academia and Industry Possess Many Non-STEM Skills
Graduate training for scientists is heavily focused on acquiring technical skills and scientific acumen. But a vital aspect of scientific research is sharing the knowledge acquired through experimentation in a meaningful and comprehensible manner. Hence communication of scientific data becomes the cornerstone of research.
Joseph Borrello, a PhD candidate and Prototyping Fellow at Sinai Bio-Design at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, highlights the need to attend scientific conferences and share his work.
“Part of communication is going to places where you can communicate,” he says, “and knowing that you have something to share even if it is not completed into a polished publication or presentation.”
Conferences are a great way to interact with other scientists, but also attending events for a broader audience can make you a better communicator.
“It is hard to condense everything down into an elevator pitch format,” says Borrello. But he emphasizes that “doing it once is not necessarily enough.” Building up to a confident elevator pitch takes practice and repetition, just like a good science experiment.
Skills in Effective Communication
Savitri Sharma Nike Sport Research La
Communication doesn’t only include oral presentations. Scientists must master communicating science through writing as well.
Nida Rehmani, who completed her PhD in Biochemistry and M.Ed. in STEM, worked on her writing skills after graduate school as a content/blog editor at Lotus STEMM, a non-profit organization for South Asian women in STEMM (the second M stands for medicine).
“Activities like writing scientific blogs is a great way to develop one of the soft skills and should be inculcated in the next STEM generation,” she says.
Academics are not the only scientists who need excellent communication skills. Those in industry require both scientific and business acumen to get ahead. Savitri Sharma, a biochemist leading the Apparel Research division of Nike Sport Research Lab, emphasizes that scientists need to develop their story-telling skills; especially when sharing results with team members of different backgrounds.
“Bottom line up front,” she says, “being able to connect your work straight to what is happening at the company will set you apart.”
It’s important to grab the audience’s attention and communicate why someone should care. Additionally, she underscores that what sets scientists apart in business, is that they can dive into the details when needed.
“Don’t shy away from being the expert that you are, don’t feel embarrassed or ashamed, be proud,” she says.
The Power of Networking
Another important non-STEM skill is networking. Regularly attending both external and internal conferences, receptions and symposia can help scientists improve their research by making new connections leading to collaborations. As Borrello explains, networking is a stochastic process and can feel awkward at first.
“All the rules of chemistry and chemical reactions that apply to solutions, apply to people also,” he says. “Sometimes the randomness in networking can enable positive relationships to develop. The only way to meet a new collaborator or connect with a potential employer is by attending many networking opportunities and speaking up.”
In industry, networking plays an important role in advancing your career. Sharma leveraged this skill to land her current role as a researcher at Nike. Further she emphasized this as one of the essential skills for her mentees during her tenure as Chair of Women of STEM network at Nike.
After working in various business functions, she declared her intent to pursue a career in research and development at one of the events. As a result of a connection she made, one of the other attendees helped her apply for the position. Navigating large organizations is difficult, but effective networking skills can ameliorate the stress and propel your scientific career forward.
Other “Soft” Skills
Other soft skills include time and project management, team work, listening and social skills. Many of these are often underestimated, but they are all important elements in today’s work environment and can give you an edge to land the job of your dreams.
“Understanding your own potential and skills is important in time management,” says Rehmani.
Knowing and articulating your value can make a difference in the productivity of a lab or a team setting. Scientists already possess many of these skills — continually refining and practicing them will help researchers to become more valued employees, and, as a result, advance their careers.
Automation and Artificial Intelligence Will Accelerate the Shift in Skills that the Workforce Needs
Projections of the future workforce into 2030 indicate that the number of work hours spent on soft skills and technological skills will rise, while hours on physical, manual and basic cognitive skills will drop. Source: McKinsey Global Institute Workforce Skills Model; McKinsey Global Institute analysis
The fastest growing occupations over the next decade will be in the energy, health and education sectors.
Published October 1, 2019
By Joan Lebow
Fabio Manca, Head of the Skills Analysis team at the OECD Centre for Skills
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the fastest growing occupations over the next decade will be in the energy, health and education sectors, while the medical and technical sectors will contain the highest paying occupations. All these occupations will require a STEM education.
STEM learning is often cited by the public and private sectors as the way to prepare for a technology-driven future. A recently published study by Randstad USA, an employment/recruitment agency, found that 68 percent of U.S. workers surveyed would focus on studying science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, if they could restart their educational journeys at age 18.
Spending for STEM education has grown substantially at all levels of schooling, largely due to the investment of billions of public and private sector dollars. This trajectory continues even with the persistent challenge of keeping young people, especially girls, engaged in STEM learning in their elementary years throughout higher education.
Filling the “Skills Gap” in STEM Careers
On the surface, an emphasis on STEM would seem to be all that’s needed to prepare the next generation workforce. But with projections for employment in STEM related occupations expected to grow to more than nine million jobs by 2022 and the steady drumbeat of corporate leaders saying they cannot find qualified workers for millions of open positions, the issues surrounding the so-called “skills gap” are not quite that straightforward.
“To thrive in a digital world, workers will need not only digital skills, but a broad mix of skills including strong cognitive and socio-emotional skills. High level information communication technology skills will also be increasingly important in growing occupations linked to new technologies,” says Fabio Manca, Head of the Skills Analysis team at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Centre for Skills.
The OECD is an international forum and knowledge hub for data and analysis, best-practice sharing, and advice on public policies and global standard-setting. “[Workers] will also need complementary skills, ranging from good literacy and numeracy to the socio-emotional skills required to work collaboratively and flexibly,” says Manca.
Also Developing Soft Skills
Peter Robinson, President and CEO, United States Council for International Business (USCIB)
Analysts agree that more training and more types of abilities are needed now and in the future for workers to fill those jobs. Along with STEM knowledge, it’s traits like “flexibility” and “adaptability” that analysts repeatedly mention as signposts to success.
“It’s not just the hard skills, but critical thinking and soft skills that will be valued,” says Peter Robinson, president and CEO of the United States Council for International Business (USCIB), a policy advocacy and trade services organization dedicated to promoting open markets and representing American business interests internationally.
Technological advances mean work itself will keep evolving. Robinson and others call for more public-private partnerships among business, education and government to help the labor force prepare for, and respond to change. Without this shared burden they see a skills gap that will only widen.
“You won’t be able to front load your education. You will have to be adaptable to change down the road in your career,” says Robinson.
It Starts with Education
Any one-dimensional academic or on-the-job background, could pose challenges. As the OECD’s 2019 Report on Skills points out, “Initial education systems have a key role to play in providing young people with the skills required for a successful entry into the labor market. However, deep and rapid changes in technology make it difficult for initial education to equip young people with the knowledge and capabilities they will need throughout their work life.”
Says the OECD’s Manca, “Recent research by the OECD also highlights that labor market shortages are widespread in high-skilled occupations that make an intense use of communication and verbal abilities, these latter influencing the acquisition and application of information in problem solving contexts.”
An ability to collaborate, problem solve, think creatively and be malleable enough for a future of life-long learning are essential, experts agree. A paradox is emerging. Such skills are often best learned on the job, and not having them is an impediment to hiring, the USCIB’s Robinson explains. He says companies will need to partner with the education system much earlier. “They can’t just show up on graduation day.”
New approaches to curriculum, modern versions of industrial apprenticeships, and efforts to re-skill existing employees and returning mid-career employees through “returnships” are among the ways to accomplish these expanded training needs. “Employers who want the right work force will also need to invest in training workers,” says Robinson. “But it will not be just about training in computers or robotics. Entire industries may change in ways we don’t foresee.”
Sangheon Lee, Director of the Employment Policy Department of the International Labour Organization (ILO)
Filling the “Investment Gap”
“We have an investment gap,” says Sangheon Lee, Director of the Employment Policy Department of the International Labor Organization (ILO). The ILO seeks to promote full and productive employment by developing integrated employment, development and skills policies. Lee also views reinvigorated job training initiatives as essential to creating a productive workforce.
“The most important thing is to reduce the gap between the rhetoric and investment” Lee says. “In over 20 countries, people are learning more and doing more in STEM. But what they are learning is theoretical and needs to be more reality-based. You need to come out of your education with some reasonable set of skills, and the job would train you further.”
Lee and other labor policy analysts concur, a forward-thinking combination of government, education and industry must support this focus on training and especially life-long learning. For now, employers are poaching skilled workers from other companies.
“They are hesitant to spend money on training for transferable skills, the very skills that are often important to success. Instead, employers typically want to invest only in training related to a specific job, keeping their investments targeted to their bottom line,“ says Lee.
This is especially true in the tech sector where innovative businesses are small and agile, but don’t have the money for significant training programs, Lee notes.
Tax Incentives for Job Training
Neither students nor individuals seeing their jobs morph mid-career can afford to pay for additional training without help. Public incentives will be necessary, from apprenticeships to late-career pivots. According to Lee, new accounting structures, tax incentives for job training, and more up-front government investment will be important tools bridging the skills gap as work changes.
Another critical issue to address that will ultimately narrow the skills gap, Lee says, is gender bias. More attention is needed to improve workplace policies and attitudes towards qualified women in the labor force. STEM skills may land a woman a job, he points out, but attitudes and stereotypes are a persistent barrier to their success especially in STEM professions.
“There is still a lot of implicit discrimination. It’s not just about the ability to do the job,” Lee says.
Labor policy analysts say it’s an over-simplification to divide jobs of the future into tech and non-tech roles; the future of work will be far more nuanced than what works for the STEM haves and have nots. To prepare for what’s ahead and be able to address changes when the time comes, as well as to find a workforce with the necessary skills, will take a longer, collaborative view from many societal sectors.
“There needs to be a paradigm shift, from employment to employability, says Robinson from USCIB.
Four different sciences and engineers share their experiences of transitioning from academia into research-focused private sector positions.
Published October 1, 2019
By Ann Delfaro
As a doctoral student, microbiologist Natasha Frank was known for challenging assumptions. Her scientific skepticism and technical skills steered more than one experiment to safety when it threatened to tank, and classmates routinely approached her for advice.
Few were surprised, then, when Frank accepted a postdoctoral position at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and started down the path of a traditional academic career. Later, as a research scientist at Washington State University, she divided her days between teaching, bench work and grant applications.
It’s not that Frank particularly wanted to become a professor — that’s simply the path graduate students are steered down, she says.
“I’d heard of a few alternate careers in science but they seemed out of reach,” says Frank. “I always thought, how do you get into those things?”
She eventually accepted a microbiologist position at Clorox, reasoning that industry was basically science with added job stability.
But that wasn’t quite true, as she discovered when her department was dissolved. While scanning LinkedIn for new opportunities, she noticed that she met all the qualifications for a position unlike any other on her CV.
She landed the job. Now she works as a patent agent for a large molecular diagnostics company, using her science training to gauge whether new products or services might infringe on existing patents.
“I went from thinking alternative careers were out of reach to having one,” she says.
If Frank’s story seems familiar, that’s because it is. More and more students are graduating from PhD programs — a 41 percent increase between 2003 and 2013 — but ultimately, only 26 percent move into tenured or tenure-track positions in the United States. Others migrate to jobs in business, government or industry.
And still others leave science entirely. Sort of.
Define ‘Anomaly’
Joseph Brown, a senior data scientist, holds a PhD in biomedical sciences and was working for Thermo Fisher Scientific — writing software to analyze peptide behavior in different conditions — when a friend mentioned the strong culture and benefits at nearby Netflix.
On a whim, Brown went online and scanned the company’s job listings. He noticed one for a data scientist to do anomaly detection; that is, to pinpoint a small number of problematic servers among the company’s hundreds of thousands of servers.
“And I thought, you know — it’s kind of similar to my past work, identifying individual peptides or genes that are behaving unusually in a huge swath of the proteome or transcriptome,” Brown says.
Video streaming might seem a far reach from molecular biology, but for Brown the shift was a natural progression of his lifelong interests in statistics and computer programming.
“The math is what really tied everything together,” he says.
Now he works alongside other scientists, most holding doctorates in physics, economics, mathematics or computer science. While few have a life sciences background, it isn’t unheard of, according to Brown.
Rebranding the PhD
David Cox MIT-IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence Lab
“A lot of it is training you how to think, how to solve problems, how to be resilient,” Cox says
During his years as a Harvard professor of engineering, computer science, and molecular and cell biology, Cox saw many PhD graduates apply their critical thinking skills to successful careers in consulting. In particular, he says, the routine practice of “analyzing data” is now called “data science” — and it’s in high demand.
“Scientists have been doing that for a long time and didn’t think anything of it, but industry has woken up to the idea that this is an interesting thing to do with business data,” Cox says. “If you know how to wrangle data, run statistically valid and rigorous tests to understand it, that’s a marketable and valuable skill.”
It’s obvious how computer science graduates might leverage that skill, but scientists in fields such as neurology can bank on that, too. The combination of data analysis and specialized knowledge — for example, how the brain and intelligence work — is especially transferable.
“Those skills are often transferable to thinking about AI and structuring experiments to understand what is happening in an artificial system,” Cox says.
Emphasizing Marketable Skills
Sometimes PhDs need help rebranding themselves to emphasize these marketable skills. That’s where physicist Alejandro de la Puente comes in.
“Nowadays, there are fewer options in academia and more options elsewhere,” says de la Puente, who completed a postdoc in physics and now offers career and professional development for STEM graduates at the New York Academy of Sciences.
The pressures that discourage recent STEM graduates from entering academia are cyclical, de la Puente notes. Few tenure positions exist because scientists who land those positions tend to stay a long time and retire late in life. At the same time, university enrollment is up. To deal with the demand, institutions are hiring more adjuncts or non-tenure track professors than in years past.
“When you join as an adjunct, most of your responsibility is teaching,” de la Puente explains. “So it’s a circular thing: You want to stay in academia, but most positions are not tenure track. And if you’re not tenure track, you’re doing more teaching and less research. That limits your chances of getting grants and gives you no chance at tenure.”
Through the Academy’s Science Alliance Initiative, de la Puente teaches scientists how to transfer their skills to nonacademic jobs, how to broaden their reach — and most importantly, how to communicate the technicalities of their work to a broader audience, including job recruiters. The program fills an unmet need for graduate students like Frank, who may hear about alternate careers but have no idea how to pursue one.
Counter Culture
Chacko Sonny Blizzard Entertainment
How does one land quite so far from the lab, though?
Chacko Sonny, executive producer and vice president at Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the game Overwatch, knew he wanted to be an engineer years before enrolling in Stanford’s undergraduate and master’s electrical engineering programs. But what he didn’t count on was eventually applying that training to the video game industry.
Strategic by nature, Sonny was working as a consultant for the international strategy firm McKinsey & Company when he realized he craved a change of pace. Specifically, he wanted to use his training in electrical engineering and economics to build and market things, and he wanted those things to be fun and creative. He saw two options: the visual effects industry or the video game industry.
Sonny began applying to every game company he could think of, finally landing an interview with Los Angeles-based Activision. He noticed a “massive” culture divide between the engineering and video game industries.
A Heterogeneous Blend Of Talent
Whereas both his McKinsey and video game colleagues were exceptionally smart, his game industry colleagues were talented across more different dimensions that is typically found in consulting companies. Teams of 200 people, consisting of a third each of artists, designers and engineers, collaborated on projects that demanded a heterogeneous blend of talent.
For one thing, debugging problems becomes a massive ordeal for video games built on millions of lines of code.
“If a character behaves oddly on screen or doesn’t display an expected behavior, you need a structured problem-solving approach to figure out why,” he says.
Games can take hundreds of hours to play to completion, so Sonny used his engineering mindset to hone in on small yet critical errors in the code. The consistent challenge and excitement of the game industry propelled him forward, and before long he’d made a career of it.
Forward Momentum
Like Sonny, Frank has gained valuable, diverse skills since leaving the traditional academic route.
“I get exposed to business development and even finance, regulatory, marketing, communications,” she says.
She’s learned how to calculate prospective revenue and determine if the company can afford a certain license. These challenges keep her engaged, but she hasn’t ruled out a future career shift.
“This experience has created opportunities to do different things, should I decide later on that I might take a different turn.”
Boosting STEM classes in public schools and retraining adults so they can enter STEM fields are only the first steps to closing the employment skills gap. Long-term solutions are much more complex.
Published October 1, 2019
By Alan Dove, PhD
Mark Dembo Cornell University eCornell
In the 21st century, advances in science and technology drive much of the global economy, employing millions of people while causing fundamental shifts in the nature of work and the distribution of wealth. These changes have led many corporate leaders, academics and policy experts to warn of a widening “skills gap,” in which a lack of workers with the necessary training holds companies back and exacerbates inequity.
Traditional labor markets follow the law of supply and demand, where filling a position requires little more than offering adequate pay and benefits based on the number of workers able to do the job. When the employer pays the market price for a position, someone will take it. In some science and technology fields today, however, companies have trouble finding qualified employees at any price.
Policymakers and educators have offered blanket solutions for the problem, ranging from efforts to boost science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) classes in public schools, to retraining skilled adults looking to change fields. However, discussions with subject experts reveal that the reality of the skills gap is complex, and suffused with thorny geographic, economic and political challenges.
Serfs Up
The U.S. unemployment rate, often cited as a major indicator of economic health, has been falling since 2010 and now hovers below four percent. Beneath that rosy figure hides a troubling reality, with huge swaths of the population in precarious, low-paying jobs.
“The people at the bottom of the skills spectrum have experienced wage stagnation and lower mobility, while the people in high skill jobs have seen more job opportunities and … great upward mobility,” says Marcela Escobari, Senior Fellow in Global Economy at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C.
The skills gap lies at the core of this bifurcation; educated, skilled workers, especially in science and technology fields, enjoy expanding opportunities and growing wages, while less-skilled individuals see their options narrowing and wages shrinking. Advances in automation promise to make the problem worse, as computers and robots replace mostly low-skilled workers. Geography also influences this trend, with most of the high-skill, high-paying jobs concentrated in a handful of major cities.
Drawing on large databases of employment and social trends, Escobari and her colleagues have identified the factors that could drive a more broad-based form of economic growth. Brookings is now producing a series of reports based on their findings, to help regions address not only the skills gap but the broader social and economic forces that exacerbate it.
“For your low-wage workers to be able to take advantage of opportunities, [they need] affordable housing, accessible transport, [and] childcare,” says Escobari. Most important, “cities need thriving industries that create opportunities for upward mobility” adds Escobari.
CEOs: The Skills Gap is Big Problem
Even with the basic services in place, training and re-training workers for fast-evolving businesses will require a major change in tactics. One recent survey found that the vast majority of CEOs say the skills gap is a big problem for them, but few have invested in training programs to address it.
Brookings Center for Universal Education Senior Fellow Marcela Escobari presents her May 2019 report “Growing Cities that Work for All: A Capability-based Approach to Regional Economic Development” at the 2019 Building the Workforce of the Future: Resilient People and Places symposium. Photo: Brookings
Companies that do implement training programs often see their workers poached by competitors who didn’t have to make that investment. Escobari contrasts that with the situation in many European countries, where strong unions and labor regulations encourage companies to collaborate on training and building the pipeline of talent, “then even when people move from company to company, they all benefit from having more highly skilled and technically able people.”
With 44 percent of the American workforce now in low-wage jobs, the problem may be coming to a head.
“People are thinking about this because we are seeing the repercussions not only in increased inequality, and financial precariousness of low wage workers, but also in the political sphere,” says Escobari.
The Express Train
That anger is likely to get worse when the current economic boom reaches its inevitable end. “It’s sort of the calm before the storm, because you have high employment, [but] as in any economic cycle, when that starts to go down you’re going to see a major transformation,” says Art Langer, director of the Columbia University Center for Technology Management in New York, N.Y. Langer, who also founded the job training nonprofit Workforce Opportunity Services (WOS), has been working on multiple fronts to close the skills gap.
Traditionally, students interested in science and technology have been encouraged to get college degrees rather than vocational certifications, but that’s now leaving some industries shorthanded.
“You have advanced manufacturing that is using all different types of scientific and computerized equipment, and there are huge skills gaps there,” says Langer.
Meanwhile, the best-trained white collar workers gravitate to trendy high-tech companies such as Google and Facebook, leaving insurers, banks and other traditional businesses short of skilled labor as they try to adopt more sophisticated technologies. The irony of these skills gaps is that Americans are attending college in record numbers, and racking up massive debts to do so.
Addressing the Skills Gap
Many graduate with degrees that haven’t prepared them for the jobs that are available. While many educators and policymakers focus on public schools and state universities to address the skills gaps, Langer doesn’t have much hope for that approach.
“Public institutions of higher education [are] controlled by political forces,” says Langer, adding that changes in legislatures and governorships often jerk policies and funding in different directions every few years. “This concept that somehow these institutions … are going to change themselves is a dream,” he says.
Instead, Langer advocates transforming the relationship between employers and job training programs. WOS, for example, works directly with companies to identify the skills they need, then finds and trains people for those positions. By focusing on underserved job seekers, including minorities, women and veterans, WOS is able to recruit eager, talented individuals who would otherwise be left out of highly skilled jobs. As that and other collaborative job training programs take off, Langer hopes more traditional educational institutions will adopt similar approaches.
The Gospel According to the Peter Principle
Some major universities are already working to boost their vocational training programs, especially online.
“Our focus is primarily on providing online certificate programs that are really focused on the working professionals [and] online professional development,” says Mark Dembo, director of corporate programs at Cornell University’s eCornell in Ithaca, N.Y. Dembo explains that eCornell works closely with major employers to determine industries’ current needs, and tailors programs to meet those needs.
That perspective reveals two major types of skills gaps. First, companies need increasing numbers of technically trained people to take on entry-level positions, especially jobs requiring data analysis and computer programming capabilities. The second gap, which has received less publicity, comes after those employees have advanced in their fields for a few years.
“What we hear quite often is ‘we’ve got people that have very strong technical backgrounds, [but] now I need them to lead teams,’” says Dembo, adding that many companies have “people that are strong technically, and then they get to a point of failure because they don’t have those softer skills” required to manage people.
More Technical Training
In particular, Dembo distinguishes between leadership and management skills. The former refers to the ability to influence people and unify teams around common goals, while the latter entails an understanding of budgeting, administration and group organization. To meet the growing need, eCornell and other online universities now offer programs to teach both. Conversely, Dembo says he also hears from established managers who need more technical training to be able to understand what their subordinates are doing.
The rising need for continuing education underscores another major trend in the labor market; companies want to hire lifelong learners.
“In today’s world you’re going to have to continue to adapt because the needs are going to change, of what’s needed in the labor market,” says Dembo. Faculty will also need to adapt, keeping ahead of trends in employers’ needs so they can continue teaching relevant knowledge and skills to their students.
With student loan debt in the U.S. now ballooning past $1.5 trillion, employers’ demand for lifelong learners is taking a heavy toll on their future and present employees. Though he declines to comment on the student loan issue, Dembo urges people to take careful stock of their skills and finances, and consider the return they expect to get from their educational investments.
Gaps in the Clouds
The ways technology firms respond to the skills gap reflect their unique needs, as well as a less appreciated aspect of the problem: geography. Companies outside major cities have been hit especially hard.
“We … consistently have to go outside of our area and outside of our state to source sufficient talent, credentials, experiences and diversity,” says Bill Avey, global head of personal systems services at Hewlett-Packard in Boise, Idaho.
As a major employer in Boise and a leading manufacturer of personal computers, HP faces an ongoing struggle to find and develop the skilled workers they need. The problem extends across the educational spectrum.
Almost half of Idaho children need remedial education as early as kindergarten to meet minimum standards, and many fail to thrive academically in later years. In response, Avey and leaders in other local companies have banded together to lobby Idaho’s deeply conservative politicians for solutions.
“Business leaders are the one group of folks that can credibly show up in the legislature and say … something as crazy as ‘we suggest you raise our taxes to spend more on education’” says Avey, adding that “it’s very different than a teacher’s union showing up.”
Expanding Access to Education
Boosting education budgets is only a partial solution, though. Even for companies in major metropolitan areas with access to top university graduates, science and technology businesses are changing and growing so fast that demand for skills vastly outstrips supply.
“The country produces about 60,000 computer scientists every year, whereas we’re seeing more than 700,000 technology jobs open,” says Obed Louissaint, vice president of talent at IBM in Armonk, N.Y.
The drastic expansion of artificial intelligence technology is one of the biggest drivers of the skill gap. Previously the domain of a handful of high-tech companies, AI is now considered indispensable in numerous industries.
“We have financial services firms, retailers and insurance companies who are all looking for people with AI skills or data science capability, (which) puts a strain on the available talent,” says Louissaint.
IBM is attacking the problem aggressively, with multiple initiatives to retrain many of the same groups targeted by Langer’s team: blue collar workers, veterans and women, who the company then places in rapidly expanding fields. Like others confronting the skills gap, Louissaint also emphasizes the need for workers to change their perspectives on education and training: “They should be thinking of learning … as a continuous journey.”
