STEM Workers

The Defense Department and the defense industry as a whole will soon be facing a shortage of qualified cybersecurity and intelligence workers, according to a report released today by the National Academy of Sciences.

The report notes the long training time needed for science, technology, engineering and mathematics workers and warns that shortages today, combined with the aging of the current STEM workforce and needs in areas like cybersecurity and intelligence, are only going to grow worse.

One way to mitigate those shortages, the report states, would be to offer higher pay to convince students to enter STEM fields in general and the defense sector in particular. The report also calls on DOD to replicate the culture of Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works division, which focuses on interesting and complex problems and endorses out-of-the-box problem solving.

The report is the final version of a study published in interim form in June. The recommendations are largely the same, but the final version discusses more issues in greater depth.

The report's authors discuss the difficulty of predicting exactly which types of STEM workers DOD will need in the future given the rapidly changing nature of technology.

The report also notes that the DOD workforce as a whole is expected to shrink, and the defense industry is reducing its numbers as well. Given these trends, the report says, the STEM worker shortage may be less severe than expected, except in fields like cybersecurity.