At Avalon earlier this month, former minister for Defence Industry Steve Ciobo released the much anticipated Defence Industry Skilling and STEM Strategy. First hinted at in 2017 at ADM’s inaugural STEM in Defence summit, the strategy looks to provide a coherent response to the workforce challenges that the Defence community as a whole is facing over the coming years.
Measures outlined in the document include:
• $4 million for a new model of skilling support grants, administered through the Centre for Defence Industry Capability, that will help reduce the financial barriers SMEs face when up-skilling their workforce;
• $2.6 million for the 2019-20 continuation of the Schools Pathways Program;
• An additional 20 places in the Defence Industry Internship Program. There will now be 50 internship opportunities in defence industry SMEs to facilitate pathways into the sector;
• Defence will establish the National Defence Industry Skills Office to improve collaboration and coordination between industry stakeholders. The Office will help facilitate information sharing, put defence industry’s skills concerns in a national context and leverage opportunities for collective action to meet the sector’s workforce needs.
A national defence industry skilling and STEM summit will be held in the second half of 2019 to facilitate targeted engagement between key stakeholders and the Office. ADM is pursuing what this event will look like.
ADM Comment: This is a tough issue to quantify to readers. It’s hard to track what success even looks like in this space, as the human factors at play are diverse. Does a student choose a STEM career/study because of a program they took part in? Did they have a teacher that inspired or killed a love of STEM pursuits? If a person does study a STEM degree or vocational pathway, do they work in that space, and for how long?
Definitions are, of course, important. It is easy to dismiss STEM as a small subset of a workforce, or think only of tertiary qualified individuals specialising in one or more of the components of STEM. Australia’s Chief Scientist describes STEM as referring collectively to a “broad field of distinct and complementary approaches to knowledge.” Each has a critical role to play in its own right, but also enables discovery and progress in other fields. This definition accords with the view taken in the draft Defence STEM strategy.
The measures listed above are welcome of course. Providing more avenues for workers in the Defence community to discover the work we do is invaluable. Australian Bureau of Statistics research finds that while STEM jobs in Australia have grown at one and a half times the rate of non-STEM jobs, the number of STEM qualified people is growing slowly - 15 per cent compared to 26 per cent for non-STEM workforce. The National Innovation and Science Agenda also notes that women only hold around a quarter of STEM and ICT related jobs, and are significantly underrepresented in high level research positions.
Most of the fastest growing occupations involve STEM skills. Defence will experience strong competition for talent at the same time that the White Paper calls for Defence growth of the STEM-based workforce by up to 1,700 people across the ADF and APS alone. The majority of these new roles are to acquire, manage or operate new high-tech capabilities.
It is tempting to think about building a STEM capability as a linear progression; students go in one end and come out the other end as STEM qualified machines, to be deployed as needed throughout the economy. This is true to some extent, but the pipeline is far from a straight line when the human element is at play.
The STEM pipeline begins in primary school and requires constant feeding at every stage as people flow in and out of that talent pool.
The whole-of-government response needed to make sure Australia as a broader economy has enough STEM workers to go around is nascent at best. There is no single centralised point of organisation for STEM programs. The STEM Program Index from the Office of the Chief Scientist lists hundreds of amazing STEM programs nationally at every level of schooling and is a good place to start if you’re looking to support an existing program.
It would have been good to see more detail about how Defence is approaching the STEM challenges at a whole-of-government level in this document. Nevertheless, it’s a great starting point to address this complex challenge.