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]]>Many metros, including the Tulsa area, are having to advertise for longer periods to fill these positions, which are also referred to as STEM jobs, because of the difficulty in finding qualified workers.
In its first metro analysis of job openings and hiring difficulty, Brookings finds that companies across the country are facing a growing challenge to fill STEM positions, despite high salary offers, according to the report.
The supply of STEM workers, which includes blue collar, craft and professional occupations, is not keeping up with demand.
For its report — “Still Searching: Job Vacancies and STEM Skills” — Brookings used a database produced by Burning Glass, a leader in labor market analytics. It looked at job vacancies advertised in every U.S. metro area on company websites in 2013, which included a total of 3.3 million advertisements across 52,000 companies.
Brookings, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, found that advertisements for STEM jobs run more than twice as long than those for all other types of jobs. Those that require a doctorate or professional degree are advertised an average of 50 days, compared to 33 days for all other vacancies, the report states.
According to Brookings, the Tulsa metro had 4,051 ads for job openings in the 2013 first quarter, of which 37 percent required STEM skills. The report said 25 percent of those ads required STEM skills and at least a bachelor’s degree.
The study also found that some STEM jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree are harder to fill than some professional non-STEM jobs that do require a bachelor’s degree, said Jonathan Rothwell, associate fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. For example, jobs that require a high school or associate’s degree for installation maintenance and repair occupations on average take 39 days to fill compared to 37 days for non-STEM jobs that require a bachelor’s degree.
“Overall, in Tulsa the hiring difficulty isn’t as severe as it is in a lot of the metropolitan areas, but at the same time, for health care practitioners, architects and engineering occupations, in particular, there does seem to be difficulty in hiring,” Rothwell said.
In the Tulsa metro, the average duration of STEM ads for occupations requiring at least a bachelor’s degree was 34 days compared to 30 days for non-STEM ads.
Tulsa ranked 70th out of the 100 largest metros for its average duration of STEM openings, according to the report.
Overall, the average number of days for advertising openings in the Tulsa area was 30.1 days, according to Brookings.
The average market value of skills requested on each STEM ad in the Tulsa metro was $61,058 versus $52,633 for a non-STEM job that is advertised, according to the study.
In the Oklahoma City area, ads for non-STEM jobs typically requiring at least a bachelor’s degree ran 36 days versus 40 for STEM ads requiring at least a bachelor’s degree.
The average number of days for Oklahoma City STEM ads was 38.
Jobs in metro areas that take longer to fill are also those that pay better and require more valuable skills. The average value of skills advertised in San Jose, California, were the highest in the country. It was followed by San Francisco and Washington D.C., as well as Austin, Texas; New York; and Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina, according to the report.
“It’s particularly important for those who are unemployed to have a sense of their job prospects in their given field,” Rothwell said.
Nationally, there are roughly 10 unemployed workers vying for one job opening in office administration or construction. “But for the STEM positions, it’s often the case that there are more job openings than there are unemployed workers. Your chances of landing a job are much greater if you have these STEM jobs,” Rothwell said.
Metro areas also benefit when they have a highly educated, STEM workforce. STEM workers earn higher wages, allowing them to spend more at restaurants, movies and retailers, which, in turn, helps lower unemployment and supports workers in those occupations, he added.
“Nationally, we’re on track to need about 3 million STEM workers by 2020, and the way we’re going we will get a million of those. So, there’s a huge, almost national crisis around this,” said Xan Black, program manager of Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance.
Launched in December, TRSA aims to help build and stimulate STEM activities in the Tulsa Region to create a true “STEM education ecosystem” from pre-kindergarten to high school students. The Oklahoma Innovation Institute is the parent organization of TRSA.
Oklahoma has many innovative industries that are heavily STEM-based, said Black, pointing to energy, aerospace, agriculture, information technology, finance and health care.
“Every job that you can imagine is becoming exponentially more STEM-oriented, even those that you might not think of as STEM-based,” she said.
According to local estimates, Tulsa will need at least an additional 4,000 STEM workers by 2018, Black said.
“If you look nationwide, the average stem job earns about twice what our average income is in Oklahoma,” Black said.
She noted that students’ interest in STEM jobs dramatically increases if they know someone who has a STEM job.
“What we need are innovative, creative, critical thinkers and problem solvers, and that’s precisely what STEM education does — makes world-class problem solvers out of our students,” Black said.
Laurie Winslow
Tulsa World
July 1, 2014
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]]>The post Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance Update for June appeared first on .
]]>The Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance had a busy June filled with summer camps, visits with business and community partners and ending with a great article in the Tulsa World, Tech-oriented workers in high demand, study shows. Below are some key updates from the month.
Please take a chance to look at our growing list of TRSA Smartsheets. If you’d like have access to the Smartsheets, please contact Annie Tyndall, OII / TRSA Communications & Marketing Coordinator at [email protected].
Without the strong TRSA partnerships with Oklahoma State University – Tulsa, Oral Roberts University, University of Tulsa, Tulsa Technology Center, University of Oklahoma – Tulsa and Tulsa Community College, around 50 middle school and high schools from the Tulsa region would not have had the opportunity to participate in the Summer Engineering Camp held the week of June 16, 2014. The students participated in building model drones, robotic vehicles, towers and more while interacting with over 15 STEM Mentors. One student named Madison Maier stated “I might want to be a civil or architectural engineer; I want to make the world a better place and engineering will help me do that.”
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]]>Madison Maier is precise with her measurements. She knows a few extra centimeters of foam board could be the difference between a soaring model drone and a pile of broken materials.
“I like measuring and trying different designs to make the best drone,” said Maier, a freshman at Glenpool High School. “It’s pretty cool that you can take regular foam boards and turn them into something that can fly.”
Though she’s only in her first year of high school, Maier is already considering a career in engineering. That interest brought her to Oklahoma State University-Tulsa on Friday to build a model unmanned aerial vehicle, or what’s more commonly known as a drone.
The project was part of the Tulsa Alliance for Engineering’s annual summer camp for middle and high school students. OSU-Tulsa partnered with Wallace Engineering for the event, which gives students like Maier the opportunity to learn more about the different fields of engineering.
The camp included instruction from Dr. James Kidd, OSU clinical associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, on aerospace mechanics and a lesson on how to build a model drone. Students applied the knowledge they gained from Kidd to build their drones.
Maier was placed with a team of eight other students to design, construct and test a model drone using foam board, glue and an electronic motor.
“Each member brought their own ideas about design and construction and they had to come together as a team to find the best solution,” said Ronald Knight, OSU-Tulsa academic coordinator for the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology. “In addition to applying engineering concepts, the activity teaches them important lessons about problem solving and teamwork.”
The project challenged A.J. Pace, a freshman at Broken Arrow High School, because of the number of people on his team.
“I like to do things quickly and efficiently,” said Pace. “Working as a big team was difficult. Smaller groups make for better communication.”
Iyan Smith Williams, an eighth-grade student at Thoreau Demonstration Academy, enjoyed the teamwork aspect of the task.
“Building the drone with others had its pros and cons, but working with other people is an important part of engineering,” said Smith Williams. “I learned a lot about myself and about building drones.”
Prior to the model building exercise, the group toured several sites in the Brady Arts District with representatives from Wallace Engineering. The tour included the Wallace Engineering office and several projects completed by the firm in the area, including Guthrie Green and Hardesty Arts Center.
“I especially liked the rooftop outdoor area at Wallace Engineering,” said Maier. “I was also impressed by their designs at Guthrie Green, especially the structures covered in vines. I want to create something like that.”
Guthrie Green is a former industrial and commercial site that was refurbished into a park and entertainment area.
“Turning a trucking facility into a multiuse park is awesome and shows that downtown is changing for the better,” said Smith Williams. “The tour gave me a feel for what engineers are doing on the job and their working environment.”
The Tulsa Alliance for Engineering offers the camp each summer. Each member of the alliance, including OSU-Tulsa, Oral Roberts University, University of Tulsa, Tulsa Technology Center, Tulsa Community College and the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa, hosts the students for a day.
The event also included a tour of the Brady Arts District with Wallace Engineering. Students visited the firm’s office and several completed projects in the area.
At the end of the camp, the experience of working with her team on a model drone helped reassure Maier that she is on the right career path.
“I might want to be a civil or architectural engineer,” said Maier. “I want to make the world a better place and engineering will help me do that.”
Oklahoma State University – Tulsa
June 26, 2014
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]]>The post TSC to Utilize Spectra Logic’s nTier Verde appeared first on .
]]>“In an unpredictable HPC environment with multiple users from a variety of institutions and disciplines, storage has been one of our biggest IT challenges. We needed the tools to react to the evolving needs of our users, quickly and flexibly,” said George Louthan, director, Tandy Supercomputing Center. “The nTier Verde/T50e combination is ideally suited to our shared environment and supports our data staging, backup and archive needs more flexibly and affordably than the market alternatives.”
Recently implemented, the Spectra storage solution is already saving both time and lives. A post-doctoral research associate at OSU Center for Health Sciences used the supercomputer to refine a software technology developed to predict the onset of heart attacks. Computational time was reduced by more than 95 percent. Computations that previously took 20 to 30 minutes were finished in less than a minute, and this data is securely stored within TSC’s Spectra Logic storage solution.
TSC’s new storage solution includes a Spectra T50e tape library along with the nTier Verde system to increase its research and engineering workflow performance, caching backups and providing nearline storage for its community’s data sets. TSC manages approximately 30 TB of escalating data, consisting primarily of scientific data sets for research projects, for a community of users that includes four higher education institutions and multiple private sector users. The nTier stages TSC’s backup data using AMANDA backup software before it is sent to the T50e tape library, which uses LTO-6 tape drives and media for backup. The Spectra Logic solution offers transparent file storage, allowing many users to easily retrieve files without needing to know where it is located. The configuration allows metadata operations and background tasks to run simultaneously without impacting the performance of ordinary file access operations.
“Spectra’s nTier Verde is an affordable file storage platform ideal for high performance, high transactional and multi-user environments like the one Tandy Supercomputing manages,” said Brian Grainger, executive vice president of sales and sales operations, Spectra Logic. “The reliable, flexible disk platform significantly boosts speeds to increase efficiency for multiple users accessing data at any given time, and offloads the costly primary storage platform.”
“Spectra Logic’s products have a strategic roadmap that greatly appeals to us. The nTier Verde is affordable, scalable, easy to use and extremely flexible. As a result, it allows us to address the ever-changing needs that commonly occur in our HPC environment,” Louthan added. “The Spectra nTier Verde met Tandy Supercomputing’s requirements for an efficient tape-disk solution that delivered good performance, speed, reliability and price per terabyte.”
About the Tandy Supercomputing Center
The Tandy Supercomputing Center (TSC) is an initiative of the Oklahoma Innovation Institute, a not-for-profit corporation committed to building an innovative economy in the Tulsa region. TSC offers the nation’s first community supercomputer, providing access to academic, corporate, and government entities needing high performance computational capabilities. High performance computing increases the efficiency of research while decreasing the time it takes to transition products to market. The result is a competitive advantage in the development of new technologies and commercially viable products.
About Spectra Logic Corporation
At Spectra Logic we define, design and deliver innovative data protection and backup solutions through tape backup and disk-based backup, recovery and archive storage solutions. By igniting innovation we challenge expectations of the data protection market with intelligent, integrated, and simple to use backup and archive technologies. Throughout our 30-plus-year history we have delivered high-density, feature rich storage with unmatched service and support to customers worldwide. For more information, visit www.SpectraLogic.com.
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June 10, 2014
HPCwire
Source: Spectra Logic Corporation
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]]>The post Spectra and the Tandy Supercomputer Shorten Calculation Rates appeared first on .
]]>America’s First “Community” Supercomputer
TSC’s business model is unique because it creates a community of users, sharing the costs of infrastructure and support, making this resource available to parties who couldn’t otherwise afford it. Located in the Data Center at One Technology Center (Tulsa City Hall), TSC is committed to continuously provide their users with modern high performance technology by regularly updating the supercomputer with state of the art technology. This allows TSC to seamlessly add nodes as its membership base increases.
The Challenge: Affordable, Transparent File Storage
The Oklahoma Innovation Institute launched its community supercomputer project in 2013. TSC currently manages approximately 30 TB of data for its users, primarily scientific data sets for research projects. TSC has a large, high-performance Panasas object storage system and acts as a global storage pool for multi-user access. The IT team decided to house some data on-site at their Tulsa datacenter, and sought a reliable, scalable storage solution to archive information being accessed by multiple users at any given time.
TSC needed to provide an alternative from their primary Panasas NAS for medium-term archive and lower-speed workflows with many metadata operations. The envisioned solution would ease the load on the primary storage to increase the overall performance of demanding research and engineering workflows. TSC wanted to offer transparent file storage access that was invisible to the individual users accessing the data frequently.
Spectra Logic
June 10, 2014
Link to Case Study
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]]>The post Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance Update for May appeared first on .
]]>We are thrilled by the impact of the Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance and its strong partners in the first five months since the TRSA launch! We wanted to update you on the many incredible things that are happening in the Tulsa region because of TRSA!
Please avail yourselves of the growing STEM related data bank contained in the following smartsheets:
Thanks to each of you for your support of a neutral convening organization for STEM, composed of citizens in the Tulsa region with a united purpose to grow a robust STEM workforce for our beautiful city. We look forward to more collaborative impact with tremendous partners like you in the weeks and months ahead.
But for the TRSA Connecting the dots – This spring more than a dozen Tulsa Community College, TCC, students had the opportunity to compete for (3) 10 week Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL, internships for Summer 2014. While doing the hard work of research in preparing their Cube Satellite concepts, the students took time to some STEM outreach coordinated by Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance. The TCC students talked to more than 1200 students, 3rd – 8th grade over the course of 3 outreach events. Following these events, TRSA was made aware of an opportunity for younger students to compete in NASA’s Cubes In Space program and passed the opportunity on to contacts across the region. A team of five, the “Fab Five”, 8th grade students took the challenge and had two of their experiments selected to be launched into space in June 2014. In May 2014, TRSA Co-hosted the Oklahoma Women in STEM: Breaking the STEM Glass Ceiling Conference which was attended by over 200 high school, college and professional women interested in STEM. This conference was attended by three members of the Fab 5 as well as other girls from the Union 8th grade center. These girls have gone on to form SAS-C, Student Advancements of STEM Careers. This group is committed to:
TRSA is uniquely positioned to connect the dots and cultivate innovative STEM opportunities across the region for Tulsa area students. These two examples demonstrate the power of a neutral backbone organization committed to communication, collaboration, calculation and cultivation of STEM education in the Tulsa region.
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