Yes, I know. "Science, Technology, Engineering and Math" as the latest hot educational trend is completely sacrosanct. Women are being pushed to consider it, companies are investing in it, and everyone is talking about it. Let me be very clear: I am not here trying to steer anyone away from STEM. I actually think that it can be a phenomenal background for the right person with the right career goals. My Electrical and Computer Engineering major taught me critical thinking and analysis, offered tremendous job security in decent-paying jobs, and gave me broad appeal to a variety of industries and roles. If you don’t believe me that STEM can lead to an incredibly successful career, consider this story: I was at a UI design conference a few years ago and was speaking with several engineers. After talking for several minutes, I asked one guy if we could connect on LinkedIn, and he responded “I’m not on LinkedIn anymore.” I thought this was odd (to an MBA, not being on LinkedIn is like saying you don’t have running water in your house) so I asked why and he said “Well I signed up for a few weeks, but I honestly was just getting too many job offers and I wasn’t really searching at the time, so it just became more of a hassle than anything else.”
Despite all the benefits, there are many ways that I’ve found in which a STEM background fails people who move into more general roles in business, which seems to be the majority of STEM grads. It's taken me over a decade to realize this and unlearn several of the things that I took for granted in school. STEM teaches a very specific way of thinking and approaching problems that can be antithetical to the way business is done. What I’ve done is lay out what I believe are the biggest problems with how we are preparing STEM grads along with my solutions for how STEM can become a more broadly applicable background, more fun to learn, and prepare students for jobs in the 21st century.
STEM teaches you to find the correct answer, not the best answer
If there is one thing that I learned in my engineering studies it was how to ingest an enormous volume of complicated information and synthesize it into a learning that could be broadly applied in quantitative practice. Great, right? I can't tell you how many hours were spent in libraries pouring over textbooks trying to make concepts stick. I was rewarded when the concept finally did stick and I was able to get the correct answer on a test. In fact, one of the aspects of STEM that I actually enjoyed was that there was no subjectivity to the answer: it was either right or it was not. I didn't have to like the answer; my professor's feelings about me didn't matter. The answer was what it was.
As most of you probably know, this is the opposite of how things work in business. There is almost never a "correct" answer, and even if there is, you may be wrong for selecting it. What does that mean? Let's use an example:
You're leading selection of vendors for an RFP that has been submitted. You have done all of the research and believe there is a clear winner: on price, quality, and every other aspect, one company has outshone the rest. However, another vendor that did not put together the best offer has a long-standing relationship with your company. Moreover, the sales team is personally close with your boss. You know that you have all the data needed to backup your selection of one company, but if you do, you will probably face your boss's wrath for disagreeing with him or her. Moreover, it won’t make a difference, because the company with connections will be selected anyway, and your career could suffer as a result. What do you do?
STEM teaches you to give the correct answer given the available quantitative data. In the real world, not paying attention to the nuances of historical actions and the personalities and relationships involved can lead to negative consequences for you and the business. I’m not saying that business people should take the politically expedient solution in all cases, but ignoring politics, personalities and nuance is certainly not a strategy for a successful career.
How do we teach STEM students to find the best answer?
The solution here is crystal clear: tie more projects to real-world examples with the professors as “clients.” Directly question the reasoning behind very fundamental assumptions about science and technology; if the students can’t defend the concepts, declare them void. Learning to bring a group of stakeholders to a consensus around the right answer for a group is an invaluable skill for anyone and the sooner that STEM students can learn it, the better it will be for their careers.
STEM does not teach you to be resourceful
If there is one skill that schools most often fail to teach students, it is resourcefulness. Technical disciplines are probably the worst offenders. Certainly there is the occasional group project that requires some interpersonal interaction, but the majority of grades come from exams derived from the official textbook. That textbook may be long, complicated, incredibly dense, etc. But examine it carefully enough and practice enough and you really don’t have to speak to anyone or even attend class in some cases. The concept of having to consolidate and synthesize information from a variety of sources and even leverage contacts to discover new possibilities is completely lost.
In business, there is no book. In fact, depending on where you work, there may be virtually no official path for knowledge sharing whatsoever. Part of this is intentional: when there is less knowledge sharing, existing jobs are more secure. Regardless of the reason, the fact is that when starting at a new company or on a new team, in order to come up to speed will require a lot of networking, coffees, lunches, etc. I have seen many people without this skill in my career, and they often remain in unfulfilling jobs for a very long time for the simple reason that they find the concept of coming up to speed on new responsibilities and skills to be too daunting. This really is a shame and, in a rapidly evolving economy, puts these employees at serious risk of being out of a job and without any fallback options. By being resourceful, people learn how to extract information from people in a way that is mutually beneficial. They develop strong networks of contacts that can be leveraged when needed. Most importantly, they develop a skill that can ensure success in virtually any environment.
How do we teach STEM students to be more resourceful?
What’s the best way to make a subject really stick in your head? Become a teacher. Similarly, the best way to enforce resourcefulness as a positive attribute could be to become a resource. I think that students need to be put in role-playing situations far more often to simulate real world experience. Since there is no book in the real world, give an assignment to half of the class and give the information required to the other half. Does this bias towards the more social and popular kids? Absolutely. Does the business world do the same thing? You bet. Let students get out of their comfort zone trying to figure out how to extract information required from their classmates and learn how information is collected in the real world.
STEM does not teach you to deal with ambiguity
How many job descriptions have you read that say the company is looking for a candidate who can thrive in an ambiguous environment? I’ve found that this can be code for “We don’t have well thought-out long term strategies and shift course often and erratically,” but the fact is that handling ambiguity is an extremely important skill for anyone in a business career. The world is not as neat and tidy as it is in a test case. Even in a technical discipline, such as computer science, requirements are going to evolve rapidly. It is well known that numerous successful entrepreneurs started their companies almost by accident as they had massive shifts from their original idea for a company. One of the most famous Atlanta start-up success stories, MailChimp, began as a web-design company that had actually given up on an email greeting card side-project until other companies started increasingly requesting it.
The point is that the end goal is not always crystal clear in the business world. Priorities and strategies change very quickly. In STEM, this is not the case. All of the tools and data are laid out in front of you and your task is to manipulate the data using the tools you have to come to new proven truths. Let me put it this way: in physics, you might be asked to figure out how long it takes a 2 kg ball to fall 40 meters under the influence of gravity. In business, you are asked to figure out how long it takes a 2 kg ball to fall a certain distance, but you’re not sure how long of a distance. Moreover, after a few days of working on it, you discover that it’s not actually a ball, but more of a disc. Then there’s a curveball that gravity now pulls objects away from the Earth instead of towards it and you’re suddenly required to give a defensible answer. (BTW, I know you are a STEM major if you cringed when I implied that the shape of the object changed the rate of descent in absence of wind-resistance. Calm down.)
How do we teach STEM students to deal with ambiguity?
In some disciplines, this will be easier than others. In general though, professors need to lay out less and less of the actual problem and push students to drive towards holistic solutions. Much like many top business schools rely almost entirely on cases, more and more of STEM education needs to be geared towards scenarios with a variety of possible correct answers. It will push students to think analytically and creatively at the same time and to work better in teams.
So what did I miss? What other ways is STEM education failing students when they get out in the workforce? What else can we do to fix it? Interested to hear your thoughts!
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