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Opportunities for STEM graduates
Changes in the international economy have switched the focus of graduate students more toward subjects like science, technology, engineering and mathematics. TIM ROGERS looks at why the STEM subjects are gaining in popularity.
With an increasing number of national governments and transnational organizations such as the European Union switching their priorities to assist the development of knowledge-focused economies, the emphasis on encouraging more graduate students to read science, technology, engineering and mathematics (the commonly termed STEM group of academic subjects) Masters and PhD degrees is greater than ever before. With subjects such as business and the social sciences dominating the minds of international graduate students in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, driven by the perception of easy access to jobs and lucrative compensation packages, the broad technology sector has seen a degree of relative neglect until this decade. The change in popularity has undoubtedly been due, in part, to the expansion of the international technology sector and the re-entrenchment of science and engineering as central to modern economic success.
Excellent employment prospects
As investment in research and development continues to grow and is supported by more open government policies, the growth of the science and technology sectors is likely to continue at an increasing pace over the next 20 to 30 years. Yet, according to the figures released by the Paris based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2007, the number of qualified graduates leaving university-level education in fields such as mathematics, physics and chemistry has declined by up to 50 per cent over the last eight to ten years. This will certainly have an impact on the employment prospects of anyone graduating in a related field in the coming years.
The shift to a more technologically and scientifically driven global economy can only be good news for international graduates in the STEM subjects. With the number of appropriately qualified STEM graduates below the level of current global demand, employment prospects are buoyant, even in light of the current economic uncertainty. Countries as diverse as China, Denmark, Finland and Malaysia have prioritized so-called innovation strategies to develop their capacity in research and development in the fields of biotechnology, information technology, mobile communications and genetic research, all of which require skilled Masters and PhD graduates. Such demand is likely to only increase. According to the executive search firm Heidrick and Struggles’s 2007 Mapping Global Talent report, developed in association with the Economist Intelligence Unit, the demographic patterns of China and India coupled with the countries’ strong focus on the STEM subjects will have a profound impact on both their national and the international labour markets: “We can predict that these two countries will yield an increasing number of talented graduates in the hi-tech sector given their strong tradition of engineering and science at the university level.”
But what does this mean for prospective international applicants to Masters and PhD degrees in the STEM subjects? In reality, this change in the world’s demand for qualified, highly skilled graduates in science and technology establishes an entirely new kind of labour market.
If Chinese and Indian students, approximately 75,000 of whom are currently pursuing STEM graduate programs in the UK and the USA alone, return home after their degrees, attracted by the increasingly lucrative employment opportunities available there, who will fill the local UK and US vacancies? With national student numbers in these subjects continuing to decline, employers are likely to seek STEM graduates from a far broader range of sources than ever before, establishing a dynamic and, in some cases volatile, labour market where those with the right qualifications are in the strongest position.
Attracting STEM graduates
The likelihood of an altered global employment scene is acknowledged by many governments around the world to such an extent that special initiatives to encourage and capture STEM graduates are now commonplace. The UK Government has recently embarked on a number of programs to encourage more research and development in the STEM subject areas and attract talented Masters and PhD graduates to either come and work in the UK or remain after their program of study has been completed. The new UK Border Agency’s Tier One scheme offers two categories of working visas, one for those graduating from a UK program of study enabling candidates to seek employment without the need for a sponsor and the second for highly skilled workers to come to the UK to seek work or self-employment opportunities. Both schemes allow for working visas of up to two years to be granted and assume that the most skilled migrants will move to a more permanent visa status during the course of their stay in the UK.
