How STEM Careers Are More Accessible Than Ever

With recent revelations about how we should all have pursued STEM education, it can feel like an impossible barrier to climb later in life. However, STEM careers and STEM education are different beasts, and STEM career opportunities do have multiple avenues to them beyond graduation from STEM education. Here are 5 ways in which STEM areas are becoming more accessible to the public.

Clinical Development

For those who may have worked entry-level jobs in drug micing and production in a hospital or pharmacy, there are huge possibilities above that station. With technologies as advanced as gene-editing becoming available outside of the commercial there are ways to begin showing your transferable skills. Cas-CLOVER provides a stable, reliable genetic editing suite that uses minimal licencing. This means a small company or a self-starter can access advanced medical knowledge and tech. These services can be used simply as proof of concept and so do not need drug development to be underway fully. For those seeking to enter genetic science, projects using CLOVER are a good place to look.

Computer Engineers

Just over 69% of software developers are self-taught. It’s an unsurprising number given that “learn to code” has been the mantra of the jobseekers for a good 3 or 4 years now. Coding and computing can seem daunting, but the important thing to remember is computing’s age. Computing isn’t an age-old industry that has been passed down, it’s still, despite all the advances we have access to, in its infancy. This means that even someone with no knowledge of the systems can access accurate, up-to-date information for free just by looking. There’s no reason that someone can’t learn the entire history of a coding language or piece of hardware and apply that knowledge to a career. The digital nature of computer data makes learning this discipline easy to do digitally, meaning no STEM Education is needed.

Statistician

While a job involving huge volumes of numbers and data interpretation may seem impossible to access without specific finance graduation, data handling is becoming part of every single industry. There’s no longer a need to centralize all those statistics, as every individual company (even every person) has access to a computer powerful enough to compute such things. This means that wherever you have experience working will almost certainly have a department concerning statistics, data analysis, and more. This means that a simple job can elevate into a STEM career more easily than something like becoming a forensic scientist, a STEM career that very much does require specific training and education.

Metalsmith

Moving away from data and computing to the physical and rustic, metalsmithing is the kind of industry that still has roots in the passing-down of knowledge. Because of this, a specific degree isn’t the only (or best) way to get training for metal smithing. Apprentices to quality forges and factories are a key part of the system and have the bonus of learning while also working, rather than learning for years and then finally getting to apply it.