Innovating the STEM Talent Pipeline

It isn’t news that innovation is key to driving our businesses and our economies. Much time is spent on its importance – our innovation strategy, how we cultivate it, how we create a culture of innovation and when to create it versus buy it. What we aren’t discussing is how to keep our pipelines full of talent with the right Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) skills. Students with these skills are critical to our long-term success and studies show these students must be nurtured and encouraged.

My own journey into this rewarding career came about by accident. I was born on a farm in southern Minnesota and, after my father was killed in a farming accident, my widowed mother cared for eight children. I grew up poor and so was our school district – cutting languages, science and math out of the curriculum to balance the budget. Fate changed my path when I stumbled into an internship the summer after my freshman year of college. This was the first time I’d heard of an engineering profession – outside of a train engineer (seriously!). I was intrigued and stayed at the company through the fall semester to understand what it meant to be an engineer. I fell in love with engineering and returned to university to secure a degree in electrical engineering.

This was nearly 40 years ago and the world has changed dramatically – especially the speed at which we are moving, the rate at which technology is developed, and the staggering rate at which technology becomes obsolete. We cannot count on a steady supply of talented students who accidentally find a STEM career as I did. We need a strong, constant source of talent and we must be innovative in our development of that pipeline.

Data show that interest in STEM careers may be moderate in high school but drops as time goes on. This is especially true for women and minorities. This decline in interest causes students to avoid the necessary classes to continue down this path and by the time they reach college, the bar to get into a STEM curriculum seems insurmountably high.

Nearly a decade ago, Abbott created a high school STEM internship program to take on this challenge. Our program engages students as young as their sophomore year and provides them with substantive summer internships. We target students from schools near where we operate and recruit the best students for the job based on ability. We’re proud that women and minorities are consistently well represented. Ninety-seven percent of our high school interns go on to study STEM in college, and half of them continue to our college internship program. In the last few years, we’ve hired our first former high school interns as full-time employees! Eight of the 11 are women.

This is the kind of innovation we must embrace to encourage young people to choose STEM careers and keep our talent pipelines full. But we can’t do it alone. In 2019, on Women’s Equality Day, Abbott publicly released a 30-page plan that other organizations and companies can use to create similar high school internship programs. Together we can shape the future of STEM.

I am excited to become more deeply involved in Abbott’s high school STEM program and will be hosting a breakfast at TEDMED 2020 to further the discussion. Please join me there, or contact me via LinkedIn, to participate in this important initiative to innovate our STEM talent pipelines.