Partner Article

Focus on STEM subjects will drive innovation

It’s Labour Market Week on Bdaily. Dr Mark Wareing commercial director at Pera Technology, comments on the need educate more scientists and engineers in the UK.

At Pera Technology, our business is helping companies innovate and create new products and services. To do this we need the best and brightest scientists and engineers to make the ideas happen.

Over the last few years we have been finding it harder to find the right people. Our experience is that there are just fewer classically trained scientists out there.

A report from leading think tank the Social Market Foundation makes worrying reading, showing that our experience is not an isolated one and the problem is not going to go away in the short term.

Looking at the bigger picture, aside from us not being able to service our clients’ needs, the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) sector is key to the Government’s strategy to rebalance the economy for future growth.

So a reduced supply of qualified peopled will severely damage the future prospects of the economy and our international competitiveness.

The Social Market Foundation report confirms my views that the “pure” STEM courses are being replaced with offers like “Forensic Science” or other science-derived courses which attract school leavers thanks to the popularity of programmes like CSI.

Which I must say are unsurprisingly unrealistic in their representation of science, technology and the people who work in that field, in the first place.

These new courses offer very lightweight science training when compared to the classic chemistry, physics, biology and engineering courses.

In addition the demise of the old apprenticeships, and the incorporation of polytechnics into ‘new’ universities, means that much applied training has disappeared, and the skills are not there for industry to harvest.

The SMF report says that the number of home-grown STEM subject graduates needs to increase by half just to keep existing science based business at their current size.

The shortage may be further exacerbated by stricter migration rules, which mean that the shortfall in home-grown gradates cannot be filled by recruiting from abroad.

So what to do? I welcome Government’s initiative to focus on traditional subjects in schools, which includes the core sciences.

However, I am keen that there is also a focus on engineering and applied science. This is something that the Polytechnics were excellent at, particular due to their strong links with industry.

But with pressure on to fill places, compete with the traditional universities and maintain a strong revenue stream has meant that many new ‘science light’ courses have often replaced traditional engineering and science courses.

In the short term, I think some thought needs to be given to allowing companies like ours to recruit from overseas.

At Pera, we operate globally, so it makes sense that we should be able to recruit from a global workforce. I would then hope with the focus now on the shortcomings of our school and higher education systems, with respect to producing good scientists and engineers, will ensure this problem is remedied in the longer term.

To end, in actual fact I do not believe it matters if we educate the scientists ourselves, in that they should be educated in the UK rather than say, Germany.

But I do feel we should educate UK youngsters to want to become scientists and it is here we need to concentrate our efforts for the future.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Dr Mark Wareing .