19/11/2008 | World Grad School Tour, Masters and PhD

At the centre of the new world-Opportunities for STEM graduates

By: TIM ROGERS

The USA is only one example. In India, where the financial liberalization of the 1990s has underwritten an expansion of almost every sector of the economy the likes of which have never been seen before, the demand for skilled STEM graduates is already outstripping supply by a clear margin. With so many Indian students pursuing STEM Masters and PhD programs in countries such as Canada, the UK and the USA, it is likely that employment prospects back at home will be at least as competitive as those on offer in the West as Indian companies compete on the world stage. Indian tech giant Infosys employs more than 90,000 people worldwide, 40,000 of whom are based in India and routinely recruits directly from the campuses of Cal Tech, Imperial College and MIT to ensure its employees are of the very highest calibre. With approximately 12,000 new employees recruited annually by Infosys, 81 per cent of their intake this year will be qualified to a Masters or professional level. Tata Consultancy Services, another Indian IT specialist employer, hired 32,000 new employees in 2007/2008 simply to keep up with their own expansion plans.

A bright future for STEM graduates
Professor Heiko Schröder, Head of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s School of Computer Science and Information Technology, a leading innovator in science and technology programs, predicts a bright future for those graduating from STEM programs: “Worldwide there are predictions that tell us that IT will grow again very significantly and the shortage of jobs in the industry is already apparent so we expect a growth in student numbers. We also know that industry investment in terms of IT, both computers and software, will grow more than ever before. American predictions are that the spending of companies on computers will grow by a factor of five in the next ten years and spending on software will multiply by more than a factor of two and with these increases that will make the spending on IT by far the biggest investment that companies have to make.”

Linking academia and industry
With such a positive prognosis for employment prospects after graduation, grad schools like RMIT are doing as much as possible to close the gap between the academic and industrial worlds. Professor Schröder sees this development as fundamental to the future of the institution: “Our success is based on having strong links to industry, for example, on our industry advisory committee we have big companies like IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Telstra, but also small and medium size enterprises and recruitment agencies. This advisory board tells us what is most important for industry. Because of this we have introduced two major features into all of our programs, the minor and major streams. In the minor streams students learn the area of specialization they want to go into when they later on look for a job and the major stream is a specialization in any area of computer science and IT that they choose.”
The explicit link between academic research and innovation in industry is a significant feature of today’s most popular STEM programs. Educating Masters and PhD students to have the ability to implement their laboratory work in a real-world setting makes graduates highly employable.Graduate programs like those at RMIT acknowledge this. Professor Schröder believes this approach strengthens their degree programs: “Our research is of international standing and is use-inspired and always in relation to what industry wants.”

Whilst Heidrick and Struggles’s Mapping Global Talent report clearly sounds a warning bell for the coming years in terms of where highly skilled STEM graduates might come from and where they might work, the US is likely to continue to dominate the international labour market in the short-term. Since 1980 the number of non-academic science and engineering jobs has grown at more than four times the rate of the US labour force as a whole, an increase of 159 per cent to the year 2000. While post-9/11 immigration changes hampered the recruitment of international graduate students and other skilled migrants, the level of interest in encouraging more STEM students from outside of the country to come to the USA has now reached pre-2001 levels, driven by the continuing expansion of the US labour market in this sector. Evidence from 2000 gives a strong indication of how valued international STEM graduates are to the US economy – at least 27 per cent of all science and engineering PhD’s in the USA and a further 20 per cent of Masters graduates were foreign born.