*This report was replaced in its entirety by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership on October 31, 2022.

The Virginia Office of Education Economics (VOEE) at the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP) was tasked by the Virginia General Assembly in April 2022 (HB217) (VLIS, 2022a) to review the occupational categories in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system to determine whether occupational categories should be added to the Commonwealth’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce profile. This report documents the results of this analysis and provides a recommendation for a more inclusive STEM profile for the Commonwealth that expands the definition of the STEM workforce beyond traditional Science and Engineering occupations and adds occupations identified as Science and Engineering-related (S&E-related) and the Skilled Technical Workforce (STW). This report is accompanied by an interactive data set (VOEE, 2022) that includes the new taxonomy and associated labor market information and a variety of regionalized analyses.

Traditionally, in the United States and in Virginia, STEM has been identified as Science and Engineering occupations requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher. However, in recent years, the National Science Foundation (NSF/NSB, 2021) and others have begun to broaden their understanding of the STEM workforce to include those occupations that actively utilize a STEM skill set. This new basis for understanding a STEM worker extends the STEM profile to include Science and Engineering-related occupations – jobs requiring science and technology expertise but not traditionally recognized STEM jobs, and the Skilled Technical Workforce — workers employed in a STEM middle-skills occupation that do not have a four-year degree. This movement to be more inclusive in the determination of what counts as STEM has happened for a variety of reasons, including the changing nature of work due to the impact of technology, labor shortages in the Skilled Technical Workforce, and the use of STEM aligned skills in these occupations. (Chen & Rotermund, 2020)

The STEM Workforce Profile produced by VOEE results in the following changes:

• The expanded STEM Workforce Profile represents a 375% increase in the number of occupations formally recognized as using a STEM skill set within Virginia.

• The expanded definition now represents approximately 43% of the total occupations defined in the BLS SOC taxonomy. In comparison, the former definition of STEM represented 9% of occupations within the BLS SOC taxonomy.

• The expanded STEM Workforce Profile includes 342 occupations divided into three primary groups:

— Science and Engineering: 72 Occupations
— Science and Engineering-related: 126 Occupations
— Skilled Technical Workforce: 144 Occupations

• In the expanded STEM Workforce Profile, 17 of the 23, or 74%, of the SOC Families at the two-digit level are represented.

— Of those, five of the 23 SOC Families have, or nearly have, 100% of all SOC within their families represented in the new profile. These include Computer and Mathematical; Architecture and Engineering; Healthcare Practitioners and Technical; Life, Physical and Social Science; and Healthcare Support.

— Including Installation, Maintenance and Repair, and Production, seven out of 23 SOC Families have over 50% of all SOC within their families represented within the new profile.

• The expanded STEM Workforce Profile represents occupations across all 17 Virginia recognized Career Clusters.

— The top four Career Clusters with the highest proportion of occupations included in the new STEM Workforce Profile include:

1. Health Science
2. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
3. Information Technology
4. Energy

The expanded STEM Workforce Profile presented in this report represents a more inclusive definition of occupations utilizing a STEM skill set in performing their job roles than previous definitions. Aligning Virginia’s definition of STEM with current thinking better reflects the realities of the broader use of science-infused skill sets by 21st century workers spanning multiple industries and changing work environments. For these reasons, VOEE recommends that the STEM Education Advisory Board adopt the broader STEM workforce profile proposed in this report.

This analysis was conducted in partnership with the Virginia Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Advisory Board and the STEM Occupations Subcommittee. This partnership was directed in the legislation. The VOEE team worked with selected members of the STEM Occupations Subcommittee closely throughout the summer. This group assisted VOEE in determining the methodology, connecting with stakeholders in the field to comment on the analysis, and reviewing the final analysis. VOEE presented this work at two full meetings of the STEM Education Advisory Board in Summer/Fall 2022.

As a supplement to this report, VOEE has provided an interactive spreadsheet ( https://voee.org/data/) that allows the user to filter on a variety of metrics and explore STEM workforce data by GO Virginia regions.

VOEE Project Team

Todd Oldham, Ed.D.
Research Director

Heather McKay
Executive Director

William Richter
Research and Data Analyst