Connecting to STEM (INFOGRAPHIC)

In the US, UK and rest of Europe there have been concerns over the lack of people working in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). These jobs are considered to be amongst the highest paid in the US and thankfully have slowly been on the rise. In the United States STEM workers show an annual growth rate of 5.9%, it means more people are interested in the types of STEM careers available. In the UK 6.6% of jobs were STEM related in 2007. This number is set to rise to 7.1% by 2017. With 1.99million people in the UK already professionally employed in science and technology, this can only encourage and motivate more people to join.

41% say that there will be shortages of those working in STEM professions over the next three years, especially with only 90,000 students with STEM degrees graduating each year in the UK. This means there will be a lack of 36,800 qualified engineers by 2050. In order to overcome this major issue, new schemes have been implemented to encourage more students to pursue an interest in any of the STEM fields, but how exactly is this being done?

First of all, STEM is raising awareness through the use of social media, a platform that millions of people access and communicate with, making it an effective way to spread the message about STEM. It is also being used to interactively spark student’s interests in science, technology, engineering and maths. It allows them to interact with professionals in the STEM fields, which will hopefully go on to inspire them to continue their education with subjects related to STEM.

The Telegraph Jobs and Courses team conducted some in-depth research around how STEM connects and compiled this in a data graphic below. In addition to this, they also created an online database called “Women in Space”, as a result of the lack of females in STEM roles in the space industry. It was created with the idea of inspiring more women to pursue a career in aerospace by providing them with a number of female role models that have made a difference. The database is interactive and features both modern and historic women that have been involved in space work. People can view their backgrounds featuring how they got to where they are today, which will give more students the inspiration they need to pursue their own STEM career.

To find out more about how STEM connects explore the data graphic on Connecting to STEM courtesy of Telegraph Jobs.