Fostering STEM Talents & Skills

Business contributions are core to Europe moving towards a sustainable future. However, sustainability is no longer about an individual company’s management, but it is about the entire ecosystem and is only possible if implemented through strengthening local communities.

“The Sustainability Agenda Towards 2030” is a new series of monthly interviews with CSR Europe’s Board Members to shed light on key CSR challenges and how leading companies are turning threats into opportunities.

For this third installment, we talked with Jean-Christophe Knoertzer, Vice President IBM Corporate Social Responsibility Global, on the challenge of fostering STEM talents and skills.

What are the main challenges that IBM faces when it comes to fostering Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) skills?

IBM would like to see greater diversity and industry alignment in STEM education and careers because when it comes to STEM we face:

Low level of interest in STEM careers and skills that could be addressed with innovative and engaging content.
A gender gap or the underrepresentation of women in STEM careers, and girls in STEM courses.
A digital divide where marginalized communities are struggling to have access to connectivity, devices, and tools for hands-on learning.
Lag in Teacher training and skills in emerging areas in STEM, which results in kids not knowing how to choose these types of educational paths.
Slow pace of curriculum updates in schools and colleges vis-à-vis the fast pace of technology.
A language barrier – although there is a lot of content available today in English, other learners who speak other languages are excluded from the new and emerging tech content.

What is IBM’s strategy on STEM? Did it change with the pandemic?

As more and more people receive a vaccine and COVID-19 slowly recedes, there is much to be hopeful about. But many will face uncertainties in both their personal and professional lives. One thing is assured: the economy will look very different than it has in the past. What that means for workers in the years to come remains to be seen.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated an already prevalent new force in our economy – digital transformation driven by rapid technological developments throughout the world. This has profoundly changed how and where we work and the skills that are in demand to guarantee a living wage and career growth.

This goes way beyond shrinking office space, remote work, and endless Zoom meetings. There have been job losses. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 2020, 8.8 percent of global working hours were lost relative to the fourth quarter of 2019, equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs. Working‑hour losses were particularly high in Latin America and the Caribbean, Southern Europe, and Southern Asia. Working-hour losses in 2020 were approximately four times greater than during the global financial crisis in 2009. This is fundamentally about what skills and qualifications are important to help meet the challenge of getting people back to work.

At IBM, we believe that a four-year degree is no longer the only solution to a good job and career. We need multiple dynamic solutions. IBM is working with educators and industry partners to enable young people from disadvantaged communities to acquire market-relevant digital, technical, and professional skills and qualifications without needing to pursue a four-year degree. We work to provide pathways in the public education systems and pathways for those who are reskilling and upskilling with free learning and training that builds technical and workplace learning skills targeting underserved communities.

As the economy slowly recovers, tech companies, advanced manufacturers, education institutions, and more must work together to ensure job seekers are prepared to step into new roles, and that we accelerate efforts to prepare those who are still in the school system.

A resurgence in career and technical education will play a large part in the reskilling and upskilling of workers to get them quickly back into the workforce. The pandemic also accelerated the shift to a blended education where these technical, workplace-related learning skills can be accessed anytime, anywhere. This allowed us to expand our reach and scale STEM learning to many more people.

For example, we launched Open P-TECH and SkillsBuild.

Open P-TECH is a free digital learning platform offering free workplace learning courses and emerging technology learning to learners and teachers across the world. More than 295,000 learners and teachers are making use of the platform in more than 140 countries with 29,000 digital badges issued. It is now available in 11 languages. The platform provides introductory, self-paced, online learning in the following areas:

Technical Skills, such as machine learning, cloud, cybersecurity, quantum computing.
Workplace skills, such as agile project management, design thinking, critical and creative thinking.
Career exposure in growing fields such as U/X design and cyber defense.
Navigating the workplace for the first time or how to apply to jobs.

On the other hand, SkillsBuild provides is a hands-on program for learners and job seekers with or without IT backgrounds from challenging backgrounds in less than 6 months. The purpose is to help them to apply to actual entry-level IT jobs that require no formal degree, but credentials that match industry-oriented job demand.

We also continued the engagements with governments and kept an ecosystem approach that leverages partnerships with National Partner Organisations, schools, teachers, parents, and clients for program expansions. Our NGO partners worked on onboarding learners in both Open P-TECH and SkillsBuild - which have close to 500K learners across the world.

Your company is also leading Together 4 STEM, the collaborative platform initiated by CSR Europe to facilitate women’s access to STEM studies and careers. How is Together 4 STEM contributing to your company’s overall STEM strategy?

Together4 STEM aligns with IBM STEM for Girls which "inspires a future generation of girls to embrace STEM" through fun and innovative programs offered both digitally and in-person. IBM's global STEM for Girls initiative aims to inspire young women to embrace STEM study and careers through online learning and interactions with STEM professionals and role models.

Together4STEM amplifies IBM's objectives through collaboration with other like-minded businesses.

In your opinion, how can multi-stakeholder collaboration and advocacy contribute to foster the STEM talents needed within companies like IBM?

Securing the STEM talent pipeline and diversifying the workforce in a meaningful and sustainable way is too big a job for just one institution alone. It requires an ecosystem made up of educators, NGOs, government, and businesses.

IBM's P-TECH school model is one way of building a multi-stakeholder collaboration that can improve life chances for young people and address the STEM skills gap starting inside the education system itself. P-TECH is expanding in more than 28 countries, and with more than 600 Industry partners, it is a great demonstration of how we can foster STEM through multi-stakeholder collaboration. A particular innovation in P-TECH is integrating industry skills development within education to gain better access to the changes in work and skills driven by rapidly changing technology.

These initiatives are built on the same principles: a way for multiple organizations to come together to scale up existing programs including:

Working with government agencies to increase programs and impact.
Focusing on non-metropolitan cities to identify talents and nurture them.
Continuing to try new learning formats in schools and businesses, for example, hybrid learning by learning both in person and on digital learning platforms

Multi-stakeholder collaboration allows for all the key players to be heard and contribute to the learner’s journey and success. This is why IBM provides parent awareness sessions, teacher development, and partnerships with NPOs, to strengthen the understanding of STEM and leverage everyone’s experience across the board.

IBM is collaborating with other organizations for impact and extended reach. Everyone must be involved to create an effective response and meet this gap in STEM talent. This includes both private and public sectors working together to help create a model to nurture learning the skills of the future. This collaboration can lead to an increase in the talent pool of those pursuing STEM careers. By diversifying the industry and making students and academic staff more prepared and passionate about these disciplines tomorrow, we can all work together to ensure job seekers have the right skills and knowledge they need to thrive in these new careers.

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