[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 19 April 2013.]

OK, those of you out there in radio land who want to help a young person find an awesomely interesting and well-paying career, pay close attention to what follows.  The jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM areas, going unfilled number in the millions, and are growing at a rate three times that of non-STEM jobs according to the Dept of Commerce.

Our ability to fill those American jobs continues to sag because our teachers lack the skills to teach and motivate students to enter STEM fields.  We have to remember that it is the STEM fields that provide the country’s major sources of wealth and ability to remain competitive in global markets.  And by any and every measure applied, today we simply are not cutting it.  When a STEM job is created in the United States, it has a shelf life that measures in the months and not years.  If it doesn’t get filled by an American, it gets filled by a foreign national, or worse, it goes overseas.

The fundamental skill that enables rapid progress in a STEM curriculum and in the STEM job markets is the ability to program a computer, to write computer code, or simply to code in one or more of the popular programming languages.  Computers can do nothing without executing some piece of code, and today computers do everything in our society.  Put it all together, it’s not hard.

We need to encourage more pre-teens to start writing code for fun and profit.  And it is fun to see what you have conceived, typed into a text editor, and then executed to perform some interesting task or graphic display that before was just the result of a mysterious process that followed the click of a mouse.  Coding requires learning to reason and think logically, and to conceive of processes in our minds that don’t yet exist – in short, coding requires creativity on steroids.

The easiest and most practical stepping stone to writing your first code is learning the basics of using a spreadsheet program.  Why the spreadsheet?

The personal computer spreadsheet launched the PC revolution in the early 1980s.  Since that time this app has been the most widely used and hailed productivity tool for professionals, consumers, and students.  The modern spreadsheet – e.g. MS Excel™ – is easy to use for tasks ranging from making lists or a simple database, to those requiring figuring with numbers like making budgets.  Modern spreadsheets also let you insert formulas for more complex calculations that a student might use to analyze data, compute the results of an experiment, or solve number problems.

Today being able to use the spreadsheet to do such things has become a fundamental skill.  For students heading for STEM careers in middle and high schools, the spreadsheet is doubly important because it greatly simplifies homework, and forms the easy and natural first step in learning a programming language.  So encourage that young person to learn to use a spreadsheet.

For some reason, our local schools don’t teach spreadsheets, but there are many online resources for learning how to use one.  Our own Sierra Economics and Science Foundation website has a growing list of these with links (here).  And Nevada County is building a Collaborative Technology Center at the Helling Library for anybody interested in expanding their computer skills with on-site mentors available to answer questions.  More information and links are available on my blog in the transcript of this commentary.

Finally, private enterprise has leaped into this skills breach with coding bootcamps (here and here).  These are start-up companies that offer the dedicated student an intensive three to four month programming course that lets its graduates step into high paying jobs upon completion and certification.  Some of these boot camps will also guarantee jobs, or it will be free to the student.  And some others are willing to take a cut of your first year’s salary for the tuition.

Yes, the STEM jobs are out there.  We just need to get our young people onto the proper career paths to take advantage of the opportunities.  And you, dear listener, may be just the one to help such a youngster, or yourself take advantage of a challenging and profitable career.  And keep in mind that, given the direction Washington and Sacramento are taking us, we need all the future taxpayers we can get.

My name is Rebane, and I expand on this and related themes again on NCTV and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However these views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  I wanted to add that graduates of such coding bootcamps often double their salary immediately after graduation.  And in the wider view, such bootcamps are becoming industry’s answer to our public educational systems’ shortcomings in turning out people ready for job markets.  (Certain private schools are already incorporating spreadsheet training and even programming classes starting in the middle school years.)  Such bootcamps have also been established to train people in other skill sets like various areas of the expanding healthcare providers and administrators job markets.

The downside of the bootcamps is that they often lure youngsters out of school prematurely.  The promise of big bucks is hard to resist, and the former students wind up with a very narrow understanding of how the world works.  I know that some may argue that they get that blindered view even if they finish the full course of their formal high school instruction, so it’s better to get them trained in something that is productive.

A statistic to keep in mind here is that our country’s schools spit out – not necessarily having graduated or completed any course of instruction – over four million young people annually.  The overwhelming number of these do not have the skills to get a decently paying job, or perhaps any job at all.  Divide 4M by twelve to see how many jobs our economy must create monthly in order not to increase the real number of unemployed.  Our economy has been woefully short of that challenge since the government claimed end of the Great Recession in the summer of 2009.  Bootcamps are a fast and focused attempt by private enterprise to remedy this workforce problem while government continues to churn out expensively undereducated people.