Today we are witnessing an unprecedented social and technological change on a global scale, and we are at the center of it.
The digital age has revolutionized and transformed the dynamics of our everyday life and caused radical changes in most industries and productive sectors. Education and the workplace are the areas that best reflect this paradigm shift.
New technological innovations, changes in production modes, digitalization, and globalization have laid the foundations for the emergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a concept coined by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum.
The current scenario moves past outdated industrial and post-industrial logics to focus on the need to train new generations in the scientific and technical knowledge that is the basis of many of today’s careers and, especially, tomorrow’s. Thus, STEM (an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) career profiles are the most sought after today and are intended to meet the needs of contemporary society.
The Importance of STEM in Education
The impact of the current global health crisis has only reinforced the idea that the world is reinventing itself. Both new technologies and the huge volume of data managed worldwide are growing exponentially. Compared to twenty years ago, the internet has changed radically. Today we consume technological products and services in huge amounts and technology has helped us to automate processes that were originally executed manually.
Universities, which are always aware of and permeable to the needs of our digitalized society, are promoting STEM-like careers more and more as they become more compatible with technological evolution. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) predicts that many of the jobs in highest demand today will disappear by 2030 and be replaced by jobs directly or indirectly related to the STEM fields (a very likely prediction if we consider that in 2013 there were 1.2 million STEM jobs to be filled and demand for STEM professionals today has more than doubled).
