SALT LAKE CITY — When KC Jensen changed his mind about becoming a patent attorney, he knew he wanted "an actual job in science."
His passion for science, technology, engineering and math was what prompted him to change his major to mechanical engineering. But more and more often, the University of Utah sophomore gets a fresh realization that it was a step in the right direction.
"No one ever came to my high school to explain the STEM thing. I didn't really understand what kind of opportunities there were for science and math," Jensen said. "I think it's really important. You don't want to waste your time in a degree where there's no potential for work after."
The STEM thing, as Jensen calls it, is affording more opportunities for students than Utah's colleges and universities can keep up with, opening up thousands of high-paying jobs in the state every year.
Technology is an especially fast-growing sector of Utah's economy, with more than 5,000 companies and 70,000 jobs that contribute almost 10 percent of Utah's revenue from payroll and property taxes, according to Richard Nelson, president and CEO of the Utah Technology Council.
State lawmakers last month gave new money to help expand the pipeline of STEM graduates, but public and higher education in the state is only "scratching the surface" of what's needed to supply local talent to Utah businesses, many of which are having to rely more on talent from outside Utah's borders, Nelson said.
Meanwhile, students in other majors struggle to find jobs after graduation.
"We are way off on our (enrollment) numbers with our eight colleges and universities, specifically software development and engineers," Nelson said. "We've got a large leak in these high-paying jobs. We're losing the economic wealth that those jobs could produce in the state."
Hunting for talent
For the past three years, the Utah Technology Council has surveyed about 40 tech companies in the state about the jobs they produce and how they find candidates to fill them.
The most recent survey released in February showed the number of software developers and engineers employed by the companies increased from about 4,700 to almost 8,200, with 85 percent of them earning between $75,000 and $105,000 a year.
Nearly three-quarters of responding companies said they plan to increase their employee count in the next year, but the same percentage said they are having difficulty finding enough qualified candidates in Utah. Forty-four percent of the companies have opened offices outside the state to recruit technical talent.
That includes Instructure, a Utah company that develops software for online education programs. Of the last 50 engineers hired by the company in the past year, roughly 20 were from out of state, most of them through Instructure's Chicago office or working from home elsewhere, according to Jeff Weber, vice president of People and Places at Instructure.
"We'd love to be able to hire them here in Utah," said Weber, who also serves as co-chairman of a talent shortage task force with the Utah Technology Council.
Many of those who do work in Utah get "multiple recruiting calls per week" from other companies looking for technical talent, Weber said. For the company, that means having to keep up with escalating engineer salaries while dealing with slower product planning because of a shortage in staff.
"We can't get things done as fast as we'd like to to release our new product offerings, and it costs us more for the talent we have to hire," he said.
Such is the case for hundreds of other companies across the state. And it's not just software engineers that are in high demand. Welders, machinists, fabrication technicians and aeronautics engineers are among a plethora of targets in the hunt for talent.
"We are having to steal each other's talent. That's how difficult this situation is," Nelson said. "It's not about unwillingness to pay for the talent. It's just inability of our K-20 (education) system to be aligned and really know what the needs are. Thousands of openings are going unfilled."
Accommodating growth
This year, the Legislature provided $3.5 million in ongoing funding and a one-time appropriation of $1 million to the Utah Engineering Initiative, which seeks to expand the pipeline of engineering graduates by helping colleges and universities build student capacity.
The program currently receives $15 million in state money, which institution presidents must match to be able to use it. With this year's new money, higher education institutions expect to graduate between 250 and 280 additional STEM students each year, "which will more than pay for that $3.5 milllion a year" when they become employed, Nelson said.
That funding is critical in places such as Utah Valley University, where students are starting to take notice of the opportunities in Utah's tech sector. Last year, UVU's computer science program grew by 25 percent — about 1,000 new students in the program, according to Michael Savoie, dean of UVU's College of Technology and Computing.
The new funding helps bring in additional faculty, but it's not enough to solve another problem:
"We are completely flat out of space," Savoie said. "I'm growing programs anywhere from 12 to 25 percent a year with the same physical facilities I've had for five years. … You can't absorb those kinds of numbers. Where am I supposed to put them?"
Expanding online course offerings has helped lighten the load in some areas, allowing students and instructors to complete the classroom portion of some programs without brick and mortar facilities.
But the talent shortage affects the university in other ways, too.
"Usually by the time (students) are at the end of their sophomore year, they're being recruited into the companies. For us, one of the big problems is that our graduation rates are very low," Savoie said. "But the reality is our employment rate of our students is pushing 100 percent in these tech fields because the companies are coming in, and as soon as the student has the skill set, they're hiring them to go to work full time at $80,000 a year."
Despite being short on space, UVU has joined other universities in reaching out to students before they enter college to show them what career opportunities are out there. STEM fairs now dot the Wasatch Front, inviting thousands of middle- and high-schoolers to talk with businesses and get a hands-on glimpse of what a STEM career could be like.
Colleges and universities are trying to help students understand what courses they should take to prepare for college. This fall, computer science will be part of Utah's science coursework for high-schoolers, which traditionally includes biology, chemistry, earth science and physics.
Part of the message educators are trying to convey is that a traditional academic program isn't required in all STEM careers, and having less than a bachelor's degree doesn't necessarily mean lower wages after graduation.
"It's not the traditional blue-collar that a lot of people think about and associate with the two-year degree," Savoie said. "Communicating that to the students, their parents, their families, especially to young women, that they understand that these jobs are there, they're available and they can go to work in that."
Student awareness
As efforts ramp up to involve younger students in STEM, higher education leaders are also trying to change the way they reach out to their own students. Savoie said the message to college students should focus on how they can connect with the tech industry in some way, regardless of what their major is.
"The conversation in Utah for the last several years has really been around skill sets versus degrees. But that's the wrong conversation," he said. "The conversation really is about skill sets and degrees, because you need them both."
That message becomes especially important for students who have yet to choose a major, or those whose major presents few job opportunities after college, Nelson said.
"We estimate there may be as many as 50 percent of our graduates that can't get a job in the area that they graduate in," Nelson said.
State lawmakers this year gave $400,000 in one-time money to provide professional development for school counselors aimed at better preparing kids for college. The money came partly in response to concerns that many students unknowingly select majors that show little promise in the job market, and that school counselors are too overburdened or ill-equipped to help them.
"If there was one area where we could help our students more in, it's advisers and career counseling centers that are really tied into the pulse of where the hot jobs are," Nelson said. "If we can excite those counselors, who are the key to that pipeline, then they'll have a better understanding of what to advise those students, starting in middle school."
Travis Shields is a freshman at UVU who is in between majors. He said information such as labor market demographics, job openings and expected wages would be important for students to know when choosing a degree.
"I feel like that would make (a major) a little more appealing knowing that there's a lot of money, and that would kind of steer me in that direction," Shields said.
Kaitlin Staylor, a freshman at the U., said such information is usually available to students who look for it. But sometimes, the message only goes so far.
"I think it's pretty important to have the resources there to help you," Staylor said. "I think (the university) is already doing a good job of that, but a lot of it's also on the student to be proactive and know what their job field is when they choose that major."
Some students take the time to consult their academic advisers, and some don't, she said.
"I feel like they're not interested enough," she said. "There are some who don't know what they want to do, so they don't bother" going to an adviser.
But being content with the status quo isn't just a problem for students, according to Nelson.
"We've had it so good for so long and been among the top states in the country. We're at the top of the economic mountain," he said. "It's our time to go reinvent it again and find a way we can have outstanding colleges and universities help our students seize the opportunity to get into areas they can get a high-demand, high-paying job. In some ways, that message has gotten lost."
Email: mjacobsen@deseretnews.comTwitter: MorganEJacobsen