It is now part of our every­day life to be sur­round­ed by high-tech prod­ucts. There is hard­ly any­one who does not car­ry a smart­phone in his or her pock­et or whose car does­n’t gath­er mod­ern IT-tech­nolo­gies. The ongo­ing dig­i­tal­iza­tion and the slo­gan Indus­try 4.0 show us today, what the jobs of the future will be: the so-called STEM-pro­fes­sions (Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy, Engi­neer­ing and Math­e­mat­ics). Exact­ly in these fields we will need more well-trained men and women to devel­op the tech­nolo­gies of the future.

11,000 free STEM jobs by 2020 in Upper Austria

The Upper Aus­tri­an spe­cial­ists-mon­i­tor (in Ger­man: Fachkräfte­mon­i­tor) pre­dicts that in just five years, there will be a short­age of 11,000 STEM pro­fes­sion­als (over all qual­i­fi­ca­tion fields) in Upper Austria.
But how can we get young­sters more excit­ed for tech­ni­cal and sci­en­tif­ic jobs? Chair­man Dr. Michael Strugl rec­om­mend­ed in the dis­cus­sion, that we have to start in three areas:

  1. We must make bet­ter use of our own poten­tial and inspire e.g. more women for these professions
  2. We should start to design our cur­ric­u­la in a new way — from pri­ma­ry school to university
  3. We should try to bring more tal­ents from abroad to Upper Austria

Oth­er points from the dis­cus­sion were:

  • Strength­en the Cor­po­rate Edu­ca­tion­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty — and fos­ter a stronger coop­er­a­tion between enter­pris­es and edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions at spe­cif­ic projects.
  • Allow the youth to devel­op visions
  • Stop to empha­size what we already can do with our tech­nolo­gies — start telling young peo­ple what we can’t do — and tell them, that only they can solve these problems

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