Early education can be the key to recruit the next generation workforce

The growing shortages and demands for skilled workers are becoming a greater problem globally, says YC Wang. He proposes education is the key to engage and encourage students from a young age.

Factoring in the onslaught of the ‘baby boomer’ generation leaving the workforce, and demand for newer, faster, better technology increasing more quickly every year, the need for skilled engineers, technicians and designers will be greater than ever before.

The electronics industry is doing a lot already to increase interest in the industry, but interest must be piqued early in life. Building a future worker’s skillset or talent must start at a very early age to compete with the other potential career fields and options that are available to young adults.

Home start

I had the good fortune of growing up in the electronics field – my father launched an electronics startup in Singapore in the 1980s. He had a home workshop, what we would refer to as a makerspace these days, and I would watch him and his small engineering team work on electronic projects, from soldering to programming microcontrollers, and working on all sorts of weird (and now archaic) equipment such as UV lights to erase the EPROM.

Witnessing all this got me curious about the field, so my dad kept me busy with cutting resistors out of huge reels. It was an awful job! So boring for an eight-year-old boy to be doing this mindless cutting, but soon enough I started soldering and doing all kinds of other tasks.

Hobbies help build the curiosity and interest in students, too. In the 1990s, I got into building computers and installing operating systems, and then in the late 1990s I got into Linux. It is because of these experiences from a young age that I’m a firm believer that the path into the electronics industry must start early. Children need to be encouraged to explore topics in electrical engineering, electronics, computers, embedded systems, computer systems and more.

There are articles, blog posts, videos and other resources on companies’ websites to help support this education and make it accessible to everyone. Most students get only a surface level knowledge of many important topics in introductory classes. Sometimes even in the advanced courses the teachers have only mere weeks to bring them up to industry standards. Making content accessible can help students learn more and better prepare themselves for future careers.

The industry and STEM

Electronics companies and manufacturers are creating many ways for students to join the industry early on and to get more young students interested in electronics. For example, UK-based Raspberry Pi makes it so easy to have a small Linux computer in a box, and Pimoroni is a supplier of maker goods that offers all kinds of introductory kits and maker projects aimed at kids and students.

The Micro:bit Educational Foundation is taking it a step further by partnering with the BBC to equip every UK Year 7 student with a Micro:bit, a pocket-sized codeable computer. The Micro:bit and BBC collaboration is a good example of the triad of government, plus schools, plus families all coming together to support future STEM education and interest.

FIRST is a youth-serving nonprofit organisation advancing STEM education. The programmes include FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST Robotics, which together engage students aged from four to 18 years in exciting, mentor-based, research and robotics programmes that help them become science and technology leaders. It is so important for parents and schools to support schemes like these that already exist and enable people to get engaged in STEM fields.

Kitronik is a UK-based supplier that provides soldering kits for young students to learn new STEM skills quickly at a low price point. Its discovery kits include items such as bicycle lights, unicorn badges and illuminated Christmas decorations.

The UK is better situated than almost any other country in the world, with so many involved and invested companies all headquartered in the same location. My hope is that the focus of this and future generations will expand more globally and ultimately better equip all electronics organisations to grow.

Beyond the suppliers and organisations that are generating interest in the field, it is critical that schools and communities establish makerspaces/electronics workshops where students and community members can frequently get hands-on experience with technology. Local companies should be helping establish these spaces as they look to the long-term interests of their business and build up their future workers.

One example of this is the four-day robotics camp held at Digi-Key for local students in grades three to eight (ages eight to 14) in August 2022. Students built racing robots and battle bots. In addition to hands-on experience, students were given a tour of the warehouse at Digi-Key and the manufacturing areas at Arctic Cat to see how motors and sensors, similar to those used in their robots, are used in real-world applications.

The future of coding

I believe that in the not-so-distant future, every student will need to learn a programming language. We are at an inflection point for the industry; knowing a programming language will soon be the same as knowing how to drive a car, just another everyday skill that everyone will be equipped with.

Coding is the first step. Students need to understand how the binary world interacts with the physical world. Not all students need to go into depth on all the specifics of course, but they should all be able to understand how the interface happens.

Knowing how to programme is only half the battle, everything has to come back to the physical world – the mobile phone is ultimately a physical device, and so is the electric vehicle. The pins on a processor ultimately work with the physical world, while the processor executes code internally.

Knowing how to programme and engineer these devices to do exactly what you want will be key. The engineering part involves understanding how the processor, executing code, forms a cog in the broader machine to get some task accomplished. Open up an old phone to see how the processor forms the core of the circuit board, but with many equally important components around it; everything serves a purpose to bring the binary world to interface with the physical.

Many universities are incorporating this broader view into the curriculum nowadays, with newer majors such as mechatronics. Biology majors need to connect experiments with data acquisition devices and build the data pipeline to a database in a computer.

Even business majors will need to start to have an appreciation of the binary ones and zeroes and how they interface with the world so they can come up with realistic product visions and business models that are implementable.

There is a need for those business majors in the electronics industry as well, so the more cross-over into other fields we can have, the better.

Different routes: same goal

There are many ways to enter the electronics industry, from going through a four-year university course, and potentially a graduate programme, to starting a practical course or apprenticeship immediately after high school. I believe both paths lead to a great future in the electronics industry.
The technician track is equally important as the engineer track. A technician’s hands-on capabilities are what turn an engineer’s designs into reality.

Companies such as Digi-Key support both tracks. For example, it works with universities around North America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa to sponsor various programmes and university clubs. It also partners with the local Thief River Falls Northland Community & Technical College to train its own technicians through their technical track.

It is encouraging to see more companies, communities and schools starting to support the future of electronics and engineering. There are many programmes already in place, but there is still much work to do to ensure that future generations inherit the necessary skills.

It is also important to keep up innovation in students of all ages to obtain the new skills that will be necessary to keep pace in the future.