How to make every lesson a STEM career lesson

According to a 2019 Gallup poll, Not Just a Job: New Evidence on the Quality of Work in the United States, only 40% of employed Americans are in “good jobs,” meaning they expressed high satisfaction across 10 important job characteristics (flexibility, pay, and so on). Researchers found that while most workers in good and mediocre jobs rated their overall quality of life as “high,” most of those in ‘bad’ jobs did not. In short, the quality of your job closely relates to the quality of your life.

the quality of your job closely relates to the quality of your life

Many factors likely underlie this stark reality, but it makes sense. How do you know if you like something if you’ve never done it? If students don’t actually do career-related work until college (when they are spending thousands of dollars and years of hard work to “do” it), we are setting our future workforce up for disappointment instead of positioning them to leverage the tremendous opportunities in STEM fields.

To combat this, career exposure must start very young. For example, I work as a civil engineer to build block towers with my four-year-old every week! Raising awareness of STEM careers need not be fancy. Every educator teaching STEM can easily turn virtually any lesson into a STEM career lesson with three simple steps…

>>> Read the full article in the May NSTA Reports here.