The future is now. We need to get up to speed and time is wasting. The Industrial Revolution transitioned to new manufacturing processes, as agrarian, rural people came to cities, learned new skills to live a better life and support their families. Today a Computer Science career enables workers to secure a job and provide for their families. Jobs in the STEM fields are not going away, and If anything will increase in number and variety.
Unfortunately, as Dean Hager wrote in Fortune Magazine, the United States needs many more tech workers, but schools aren’t providing enough training to meet the requirement:
-Nine in 10 parents want their child to study computer science, but only one in four schools teach computer programming, according to the organization behind Computer Science Education Week, an annual program dedicated to inspiring K-12 students to take interest in computer science.
- There are currently 607,708 open computing jobs nationwide, but only 42,969 computer science students graduated into the workforce last year, says org, a non-profit dedicated to expanding access to computer science.
-By 2018, 51% of all Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) jobs are projected to be in computer science-related fields, according to the White House. The federal government alone needs an additional 10,000 IT and cyber security professionals, and the private sector needs much more. “Computer science is not only important for the tech sector,” says a White House fact sheet, “but also for a growing number of industries, including transportation, healthcare, education, and financial services, that are using software to transform their products and services. In fact, more than two-thirds of all tech jobs are outside the tech sector.”
-And, women and minorities are woefully underrepresented in computer science education (and the computer science field in general). In the fewer than 15 percent of all high schools that offered any advanced placement computer science courses in 2015, only 22% of those who took the exam were girls and only 13% were African-American or Latino students.
It is imperative we as educators look for ways to secure CS education for our students. We need to rise to the occasion and offer our next generation a chance to succeed in the 21st century’s next Industrial Revolution.
I have worked in education for some time Teaching, selling assorted software and Education tools, but, it wasn't until I started selling into the Technology market that I realize the importance of CS, STEM and Applied Technology.
I quickly became aware of articles from on Education, Technology and Manufacturing all pointing to the need to increase CS and STEM education. These articles gave statistics on companies current and future needs. My reaction was WOW! I know districts are doing their best to integrate technology with little financial support but in this area, TECHNOLOGY, even people in the know realize how quickly changes can come.
It has become my mission to help bring Education into the 21st Century so that our children have a chance to compete with the rest of the world, and that’s why RobotLAB offers an array of CS products chek them out!
