"Who Moved My Cheese?"
For those who don't know the story - its about four beings that live in a maze together. Two of the beings are mice ( Sniff and Scurry) and two are very small humans the size of mice (Hem and Haw)
Every day the mice and the little people would scurry around their maze in search of their favorite cheese. The maze had corridors and chambers and many blind alleys that might lead to nowhere. However, for those willing to run the maze and find their way - the maze held the secrets that could let the mice and little people enjoy a better life. Once the mice and little people found a reliable source of cheese, they went directly to their cheese stations every morning. They ceased searching for new supply since the known pathway was the key to the cheese. The long and short of it was that the easy access to the cheese made Hem and Haw lazy. They no longer ran around the maze-like the mice but built their lives around an endless supply of cheese in a specific spot.
Eventually, they used up all the cheese and they had to find a new supply. The rest of the story deals with the difficulties of changing your way of thinking and lifestyle to obtain your fair share of cheese.
Moving the Cheese on "STEM"
Why doesn't this sort of analogy work for those in STEM fields? Its an issue of time combined with the specificity of the training. Without insulting business majors and MBA's - I tend to think of these fields of work as being based on "soft" knowledge that is easily malleable to a variety of situations. A person with a business degree, in finance, or with an MBA or even an attorney has a skill set that took at most 3-4 years of formal education beyond an undergraduate degree. Moreover, that skill set can be readily applied in any variety of directions. The skillset is broad enough to accommodate a variety of career pathways. People like this can reinvent themselves quite readily over and over again. They can blow with the winds of change and deal with shifting sand with a fair degree of ease.
Contrast that with someone in a STEM career who requires a Ph.D. and several years of postdoctoral training to even begin to search for a real job. The doctorate in many fields can take up to 7 years of full-time study postgraduate. Most candidates are 30 and over before they finish the Ph.D. Most require additional education as post-docs for several years. For a biomedical scientist, the pipeline to a "real" job is realistically about 15 years. These days Once a newly minted scientist "arrives" at that point they often find that the cheese hasn't just been moved its been sucked up into the same vacuum that has siphoned 80% of the new wealth to the top 1%.
The skills required in order to obtain a doctorate in any STEM field are extensive and the course of study is extremely difficult. But these are "hard skills" by necessity the training is very specific. Unlike the MBA or the JD, this type of skill set does not lend itself to reinventing one's self. Finding new cheese with that skill set is going to be a whole lot tougher than for other fields. The situation is made worse by the fact that the newly qualified scientist hasn't been able to store any cheese along the way. They emerge from their academic cocoons starved for cheese and hanging by a financial thread.
The market cycle is out of sync with the STEM Training cycle...
Put simply - the cheese is being moved (or siphoned away) at a faster rate than the training cycle for many of these fields which is creating a ridiculous chase for skills that are often obsolete or outsourced by the time they are obtained.
The market for these skills, as it turns out, is extremely fickle and sometimes completely transient as corporate moguls see fit to outsource employment to places like India and China where people will work for pennies on the dollar. As public sector grants shrink - there is more pressure to suppress salaries through "insourcing" foreign workers on H1-B and created even harsher working conditions. Its the robber baron economy mentality that is doing everything it can do to keep this highly skilled pool of talent in abject poverty.
So when I cynically say that the drumbeat for a more technical, highly trained workforce is just nothing but hype - please forgive me - but the facts get in the way of my thinking of it any other way.
Further Reading:
STEM Careers - The hype bumps up against the post-doctoral logjam
©2011 - RMG Hicks - http://www.therobberbaroneconomy - All rights reserved.
Its like you read my mind! You appear to know so much about this,
ReplyDeletelike you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you could do with some pics to drive the message home a little bit, but instead of that, this is wonderful blog.
An excellent read. I will certainly be back.