CAREER: Bridging the STEM Skills and Employment Gap for the Future of Work

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is predicted to disrupt the way many people work, especially adults without a college degree. On the other hand, AI is predicted to create new job opportunities, primarily in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). This project explores how more adults without college degrees can obtain these higher-paying STEM jobs created by AI and new technologies. Because employment is the primary way people gain social and economic mobility in the U.S.A., the goal is to develop new, holistic understanding about the factors that will help adults without college degrees to overcome labor market barriers to access, participate in, and complete STEM education and training for higher-paying jobs created by new technologies. The results will help develop grounded solutions for institutions, organizations, and policy makers to ensure the future of work will have more equitable societal outcomes, particularly for groups who have largely been left behind as jobs have transformed in the past few decades. The project pursues this objective in three ways. First, the project uses ethnographic methods to develop in-depth, grounded hypotheses about the organizational, social, and behavioral factors that adults without a college degree face when trying to obtain new STEM skills and jobs. Second, the project uses the insights from the first part to employ field experiments testing which grounded hypotheses lead to better organizational, individual, and employment outcomes. Third, these results contribute to creating evidence-based curriculum and strategies that organizations and universities can use to help people without a college degree obtain higher-paying jobs created by AI and new technologies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.