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New Study Suggests No Shortage of American STEM Graduates
An anonymous reader writes "A study released Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reinforces what a number of researchers have come to believe: that the STEM worker shortage is a myth. The EPI study found that the United States has 'more than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations.' Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they've been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the information technology industry. (IT jobs make up 59 percent of the STEM workforce, according to the study.)"
By the time training is available all the important development work has already been done and the companies that did it have collected the profit. Companies need the type of engineers that can do the development work and create new things. These engineers are the ones that are hard to find and in short supply. Engineers that need training to work on a new technology will always be late to the party and a dime a dozen (read: not that valuable and not hard to find).
The problem is that people are talking past each other. There are different classes of engineers. Class A, are the type that invent new things that haven't been done before. For this class a great engineer is worth 10x, 100x, 1000x that of an average engineer. You cannot train someone to be this type of engineer, they are rare and hard to find. The second type (Class B) are the 'turn-the-crank' type of people that work processes that were developed by someone else, or create a product that is a copy of an existing product from a different company. There is no shortage of this type of engineer, they are easy to find, or can be acquired by training a new hire.
Pointing to a large number of Class B engineers is not a refutation of the claim that there is a shortage of Class A engineers.
--- There are two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it