IT sector pays much better than other STEM positions
COMPUTER SCIENCE GRADUATES EARN 40% MORE THAN BIOTECH GRADUATES IN THE US
The US national priority in education can be summed up in a four-letter acronym: STEM. A country’s proficiency in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is vital in generating economic growth, advancing scientific innovation and creating good jobs.
Much of the public enthusiasm for STEM education rests on the assumption that these fields are rich in job opportunity. STEM is an expansive category, spanning many disciplines and occupations, from software engineers and data scientists to geologists, astronomers and physicists.
What recent studies have made increasingly apparent is that the greatest number of high-paying STEM jobs are in the “T” (specifically, computing).
Earlier this year, Glassdoor, a jobs listing website, ranked the median base salary of workers in their first five years of employment by undergraduate major. Computer science topped the list with $70,000 (Dh257,105), followed by electrical engineering ($68,438). Biochemistry ($46,406) and biotechnology ($48,442) were among the lowest paying majors in the study.
“There is a huge divide between the computing technology roles and the traditional sciences,” said Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor’s chief economist.
Michael S. Teitelbaum, an expert on science education and policy believes that STEM advocates, often executives and lobbyists for technology companies, do a disservice when they raise the alarm that America is facing a worrying shortfall of STEM workers, based on shortages in a relative handful of fast-growing fields like data analytics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing At LinkedIn, researchers identified the skills most in demand. The top 10 last year were all computer skills, including expertise in cloud computing, data mining and statistical analysis, and writing smartphone applications. In a recent analysis, Edward Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, focused on the Bureau of Labour Statistics employment forecasts in STEM categories. In the decade ending in 2024, 73 per cent of STEM job growth will be in computer occupations, but only 3 per cent will be in the physical sciences and 3 per cent in life sciences. and computer security.
“When it gets generalised to all of STEM, it’s misleading,” said Teitelbaum.
If physicists and biologists want to enjoy the boom times in the digital economy, a few specialist start-ups will train them and find them jobs as data scientists and artificial intelligence programmers.
Insight programme
Insight Data Science Fellows Programme, which has offices in New York, Boston, Seattle and Palo Alto, California, began its first training programme five years ago and now has 900 alumni working at companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Amazon and Microsoft. Jake Klamka, a physicist who founded the programme, kept hearing from Silicon Valley executives that they had considered hiring traditional scientists, but converting them to technologists seemed time-consuming and risky. So Klamka decided he would start a company to provide scientists a smoother pathway into the tech industry.
Carlos Faham made that passage. Faham joined the seven-week Insight Data Science Fellows programme in 2015. There was no formal course work. Other than a few tutorials by industry people, the time was spent creating a product — his was software for recognising and tracking faces in video — and training for interviews. After the programme, he received six job offers. He accepted the offer from LinkedIn. (Insight is free for participants; hiring companies pay a fee.) Today, Faham, 33, is a senior data scientist, working on a team that uses machine learning and statistical models to detect illicit activity on the social network, including fake job listings, ad fraud, spam and bot attacks.
About 90 per cent of those who enter the programme have landed jobs as data analysts with a dropout rate of about 3 per cent.