Early exposure key to Florida tech expansion
ORLANDO, Florida — Lockheed Martin could take advantage of young people’s interest in space, having partnered with NASA in an effort to reach Mars for years.
But for that to happen, the company must be more proactive and reach them earlier to inform them about career options, a company official said recently in Orlando.
“We need to create those connections at a very young age,” says Jennifer Mandel, a strategic philanthropist with Lockheed Martin. “We want them to dream about partnering with NASA to inhabit the area above Mars.”
Early exposure is key, agrees Jennifer Kane, a technology teacher at Timber Creek High School in Orlando.
“If you get them really early, it’s easier for them to fall in love with it and want to pursue it,” she says.
Mandel and Kane joined representatives from John Deere, Toyota, Amazon and Verizon, among others, at this year’s Project Lead the Way event in Orlando. The STEM-based (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) program brought 2,000 educators, business leaders and other advocates from across the United States to Orlando. Kane accompanied a team of tech students who delivered a speech pushing for the effort.
Project Lead the Way is one program that tries to solve the tech industry’s most-pressing need: people. Colleges and high schools have focused on increasing STEM-based learning for years, as more introduce robotics classes and battlebots competitions.
But if students are to pursue tech careers in the future, businesses must partner with local schools and reach them sooner, Orange County Public Schools superintendent Barbara Jenkins says.
“It’s all of our responsibility to develop these young people into future employees and future citizens,” she says. “It has to be a collective effort.”
Lockheed Martin, which employs more than 7,000 people in Central Florida, partnered with Orange County Public Schools in 2015 on a $2 million grant that helped the district develop training programs under the Project Lead the Way banner.
That has opened the door for students to learn more technology-oriented skills, Jenkins says.
“I am so impressed at what young people are capable of,” she says. “We believe adults have to encourage young people, coerce them, push them sometimes into tougher courses. ‘Smart’ is not something you are. It’s something you become if you work hard.”
Dennis Parker, founder of Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education who leads Toyota’s efforts to expand STEM-based learning, says efforts to grow the workforce haven’t been successful just yet. That impedes companies and also leaves some students behind if they get to college without STEM skills, he says.
“When they graduate, they are just not work-ready,” Parker says. “We need to fix that.”
Mandel says a company’s involvement has to go beyond merely “writing a check”, with mentoring and guidance among the extra efforts she is pushing for.
But she says the fact that the conversation is ongoing is encouraging.
“The good thing is that everybody understands that there is a problem,” she says. “But it’ll take a bit to get there.”