Training U.S. Workers for Nanotech Revolution Is No Small Thing
A few months ago, I rather pessimistically wrote that U.S. workers were unprepared for the nanotech revolution. Today, I’m seeing some signs of hope.
First, though, some background. The United States produces a great number of nanotech Ph.D.s, but these researchers are not the ones who are going to run the equipment at these new nanotech companies that spin out of the research.
Earlier this year, I spoke to a couple of folks at a Chicago-area company called NanoProfessor, which sells a relatively low-cost kit of educational and nanomanufacturing tools. The company reports that it is seeing the most active interest from developing nations, whose governments have no problem spending extra cash to encourage nanotech research. Systems are selling in Brazil, Colombia, Turkey, China, and India. The company says these countries are serious about training the next generation of nanotech workers — not only researchers.
Through these tools, developing nations can tailor nanotech’s development to their own needs. We’re seeing this in Israel, where the focus is on water purification; in India, where some emphasis is placed on preventing and curing malaria; and even in Iran, where there is a vigorous government-supported nanotech research initiative that the Iranians actually credit international sanctions for encouraging. With a homegrown industry, nanotech companies do not need to compete internationally and can focus purely on local needs.
In Nigeria, the government is urging further development of nanotechnology as a way of cleaning up after decades of environmental abuse by oil and gas companies. In Suzhou, China, the Nano-Polis project will train tens of thousands of workers in nanotechnology.
We can argue all we want about the value of government investment in any single technology, but remember that nanotech is not any single technology at all and the government needn’t choose winners and losers. So, before any Solyndra comparisons are made, let me explain why this is different.
A misunderstanding of what nanotech is — or has the potential to become — lies at the heart of what is wrong with much of nanotech reporting today. It reflects the hopes and fears and levels of cynicism of the beholder. I hear far too much, by people who should know better, how nanotech is simply chemistry or simply biology or simply chip size.
In reality, nanotech is all these things and much more. And, likely a generation or two from now, the word “nanotech,” itself, will become redundant since it will describe pretty much how everything is made and tailored to specific uses. It will be the composition of the building material that surrounds you, the specialized material in the body of the car you drove to work today, the electronics that control it, the food you eat, the medicines that keep you healthy … and more.
So an investment in training of nanotech workers does not pick any individual company or technology. It simply ensures that U.S. workers are ready to be hired.
There may not be immediate demand for nanotechnology technicians in this region, but there will be as the field continues to grow, Brinkruff said. “We’re ahead of the demand,” he said.
More people that won’t be able to get a job. Are students that major in women studies ahead of the demand?
As I point out in the article, there are current openings in places like Albany, N.Y., where 300 nanotech jobs needed to be filled. They held a nanotech job fair to fill them. Similar events are happening across the country. I haven’t heard of any Women’s Studies job fairs.
Graduate numbers don’t reflect a glut of women’s studies majors. On the contrary, we’ve had a huge growth in “business” degrees. There’s nothing wrong with business per se, but we’ve educated a great deal of people who think they will be running companies without understanding the technical and scientific underpinnings of how to make things.
Moreover the emphasis isn’t on innovation, but financial innovation. Derivatives, mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps were all the products of financial innovation. The banks and hedge funds have been more interested in speculative risk than actually funding businesses that can grow and hire employees.
Nail, meet Head.
Lemme try again. You nailed it.
“…we’ve educated a great deal of people who think they will be running companies without understanding the technical and scientific underpinnings of how to make things.”
Total agreement there. And I hope I’m not turning anyone off/sidelining the discussion if I give as one example … the supposedly educated intelligent people who believe that wind and solar electricity generation is actually going to be large-scale, effective, and practical.
The development of technology is too important to be left in the hands of the greedy. It must be placed firmly in the hands of the compassionate. Nanotechnology must not be allowed to become like big oil. All greed in this industry must be stopped before they start making so much money and become all-powerful like the oil industry.
While we will probably all die on an overheated, poisoned planet in one hundred years becuase of global warming caused by the greed of big oil; we can still stop greed from taking over nanoteach or we could all day in one hundred minutes as a result of Bill Joy’s grey goo.
“There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone” – Steely Dan
Based on recent election results I guess this is what passes for intelligence and normal in this country now.
Hmm, let’s start a business where there is no greed – ie, no economic return.
Unless YOU, wealthy investor will be using ONLY your money, good luck! No return – no investors. OTOH, if you are that wealthy to use your cash to run the whole nano tech industry, then YOUR intentions can be called under scrutiny.
There are many novels and stories in the history of the planet where the intelligentsia wanted to rule, and lock out the lower IQ models.
Problem is, the ‘brainy’ type get tired of emptying wastebaskets and oing mundane testing so they employ ‘lesser skilled’ Ygor types, who then take over the lab when they find out they are being left out.
That’s funny. And after yesterdays debacle, I needed a good laugh. Don’t worry, Obama will get to Big Oil after he finished bankrupting the American coal industry. Then, while we are freezing in the dark under the hulks of broken windmills which seized and threw their blades like Godzilla throwing 200 foot long spears, the Chinese will continue to grow their economy and military, all fueled by their coal. Then they will roll over us and become the dominate world power, all the while laughing their way to the carbon bank.
And what is Gaia’s reaction to all this? Nothing. The Earth will continue to warm and cool, just as it has done for millennia. Carbon will also rise and fall, as it has always done. In response, plant life will rise and fall with the carbon, keeping everything in balance. Cloud cover will also do it’s part in the highly complex system that Man understands so little of that they can’t even reliably forecast the weather two days from now.
And so it will continue. Long after Yobbin has stopped throbbin, and his grave long forgotten, the Earth – now headquarters to the United Federation of Planets, and a popular stop among warp drive travelers – will continue to warm and cool, but hopefully it’s residents will have progressed to the point where Scotty will no longer have hear the lament: “Beam me up, there is no intelligent life here!”
Capitalism bad, socialism good eh? What I will never understand is why you greed adverse wine drinkers don’t move to a greed-less socialist paradise like Cuba or Venezuela? Why don’t you? Move or shut up already.
Half of the U.S. population has an IQ at or below 100, and 100 is not too smart. More than half are functionally illiterate. You really think we are going to revolutionize the world with our work force? LOL.
The average IQ will always be 100 because IQ scores are calculated that way. They take all the results from testing and set the average to equal 100. The median IQ score (most common score) is about 110. However when comparing to IQ tests 50 or more years ago, today’s 110 would equal 130 back then. A score of 80 today would equal 100 back then.
There is a disparity in the current scores where the most common score is around 110, there are a lot more high scorers, and a large chunk of the population who score in the 70 to 80 range who are mostly lower income and illegal immigrants.
The large chunk of low scorers brings down the average, however not too many people test right at 100. Today’s idiots are smarter than yesterdays average scorer, and most of the population is much smarter than just a few generations ago. Intelligence does not correlate to wisdom unfortunately, it also allows greater scope for smart yet foolish people to mess things up in creatively destructive ways.
Note that the bell curve is a lie. Outliers skew the results. One crack baby with a 40 IQ negates 6 people with 110 IQ or 2 with 130 IQ and lowers the average to 100. 1 person with an 80 IQ negates 2 people with 110 IQ. The median intelligence (most common score) can be higher or lower than than the average.
The American Education System, however, views the bell curve and averages as the holy grail which is why our school system sucks. The curriculum is designed for an average student that doesn’t exist. Couple that to political indoctrination which further waters down the curriculum and you have a sound argument for home-schooling and private schools.
What *specifically* is the kind of training you have in mind for nanotech workers? What do they need to be able to know/do that is different from a worker in a normal process plant (chemicals, plastics, beer) or a semiconductor fab?
There’s been a lot of talk about “training for green jobs,” but it turns out the skills of a welder for a solar-thermal power plant aren’t really any different from the skills of a welder in an ordinary power plant. Is this really different?
It depends on which application to nanotechnology we’re talking about. If it’s semiconductors, new nanoscale chip fabrication processes and dealing with new materials such as carbon nanotubes. If it’s biotech, new nanotech-enabled drug-discovery methods and more powerful, sensitive equipment. “Green” jobs are part of it — new materials for better solar panels, for example. The Chinese are already ahead of us there.
U.S. history has many examples of government success in training workers for emerging industries. Do you remember learning about the massive federal and state programs to train up oil field workers as whale oil became scarce in the mid-19th century? And the programs of the 1950s and early 60s in the San Francisco Bay Area that prepared workers for what would later become Silicon Valley? If you do, you’re deluded because they didn’t exist.
I’m unconvinced that companies adopting the fad label of “nanotech” are unable to train their own workforce. If the automobile, aviation, plastics, aerospace, computer and semiconductor industries of 20th century America could, then “nanotech” can too.
Here’s a better example, and one that is more appropriate. The GI Bill. That was a government program that helped prepare the workforce for anything that came around in the 1950s and 1960s. Anything. Again, nanotech is not any one technology. It is how everything will be made, measured, manufactured. Everything.
Sounds like a chicken and egg situation. There won’t be much demand for nanotech training until there are jobs for the trainees and there won’t be many jobs until there are people who can fill them. Good luck with that.
Given the rapidly advances in nanotech, it’s hard to visualize what kind of training to provide. You can give generic “working with really small stuff” training but once you get specific on operating particular types of production machinery, you’re in trouble. Any particular type of machine is likely to become quickly obsolete.
> It will take a true public-private partnership, on a national scale
Shouldn’t be a problem; we are awash in money that needs to be spent.
Because the status quo:
> some states doing better than others
is completely unacceptable. Equality of Outcomes!
I think I like the new America; this is really easy: Federal program for everything, paid for by printing money.
Good to see PJ Media getting on the bandwagon so quickly.
‘Equality of outcomes’?
You mean communism? Socialism?
I think opportunity should be equal, not the outcome – ie, social justice?
There is no such thing that lasts very long.
The people who work will want more than those who do not.
That’s why the U.S. is in the problems it is now.
And then there are the hundreds of thousands of unemployed and under-employed US citizen tech workers who read about nano-tech in the 1990s and looked forward to the employer you would include it in new-hire training. No dice.
US employers since about 1990 hate new-hire training, and hate retained employee training even more. What they like is bodyshopping… especially cross-border bodyshopping, and any and every flimsy excuse for more is taken as unavoidable fact, a law of nature, not to be disputed.
We’re already starting to see articles about nano-fibers causing something akin to silicosis. So much for millions of Americans being able to own batmobiles.
By definition roughly half of the world population and half of the USA population has an IQ at or above 100;
about 16% of Americans have an IQ of 115 or above (i.e. one standard deviation above the mean or better);
about 2.5% of Americans have an IQ of 130 or above;
about 0.15% of Americans have an IQ of 145 or above;
about 0.01% of Americans have an IQ of 160 or above.
Perhaps, instead of flooding the USA with cheap, young, pliant foreign labor with flexible ethics, we should set a floor, a minimal standard. If you’re applying to study or work in the USA, and you’ve passed the background investigation (US agents have visited and questioned your relatives, neighbors, teachers, professors, employers, co-workers, class-mates, former boy-friends and girl-friends, local police, and are satisfied that you are not likely to initiate force or fraud nor to engage in academic or professional cheating or espionage), then, at the next stage of testing it is found that you have an IQ of 160 or above (or equivalent), you can continue the application process; you have a chance to come to a college or university or work in the USA on condition of your good behavior. If you fail the background investigation, you’re out. If you fail the IQ or equivalent, you’re out. If you pass and you continue to be a nice person, welcome! We’ll throw a party.
Now about that “eternally free, eternally young” part, where do I sign up, because that’s looking more and more out of reach.
All of the above is true, and wrong. If this is due to ignorance of a revolution in material science, but an open mind, we can make progress. IF. First, a definition, and meaning. A nanometer is 10-9 meters, roughly the size of three atoms side by side. Nanotechnology is the field of making matter atom by atom, similar to what a brick layer does in a wall. The essential distinction of nanotechnology is the making of pure matter, without defects. Defects dominate our world, micro cracks, impurities, grain boundaries control all material properties. Example: A few years ago, when I was active, a ten pound diamond was made from soot, processed welding gas, carbon. Other than motivating pretty ladies, a diamond is the “perfect” heat transfer material while being the “perfect” electrical insulator. (Nothing is perfect, but somethings are miraculous.) This will redefine everything known about electricity. Nanotechnology will permit, for the first time in human history, medicines which are so small, they will pass the brain – blood barrier, and allow spectacular treatments of brain disease. The field has already developed 5 feet long metals without a grain boundary, thus making jet engines more than twice as powerful for the same weight. Any thing which uses materials, will be revolutionized by this technology. Example: A carbon nanofiber tethered satellite may lead to an aircraft carrier sized satellite in synchronous orbit due to the small dollars per pound lift capability. Whoever permanently stations a 5,000 man enormous satellite 300 miles above another nation’s capital, will hold three aces.
However, like Solyndra, the government poured billions on institutionalizing a national Nanotechnology initiative whose first decree, after staffing all high level positions in fancy offices, was a plea, “Does any one know what to do?” A more basic law was in effect: nothing done by man is free of corruption. Oceans of money have been spent without result, for the same reason our government screws up most technology: little or no accountability.
However, unlike climate change, or green energy, nanotechnology will, and can revolutionize any nation which gets it right. It is bigger than those who sailed ocean going vessels from Europe to India and hit an obstacle, two continents.
My favorite (I am no longer current) is superconductivity. No one knows exactly how it works, but it works. Years ago, any scientist who emailed a claimed break through, always got the first hard wired question, “what color is it?” All superconductors, which worked, were green.
However, after the election, and considering Solyndra, the too-big-to-fail banks, and the disaster of nuclear power, which destroyed the careers of the best technical minds in this nation, I could not recommend any technical field to a bright teen. Your career could vanish by the election of some technical genius like Ted Kennedy. If you want to learn nanotechnology, I advise you learn Mandarin first. China is eating our lunch in high tech, and we just set another four year course before them. We have the exact same policy makers in power, as the crowd who wages endless war, and gave trillions to their buddies without any results. They all rave about needing more engineers, but the Solyndra engineers no longer believe in a bright tomorrow. They deliver piazza, or run motels.
Let’s see. I think I’ve been hearing about nanotechnology for 20 years now. I don’t think I’ll hold my breath waiting for the nanotechnology industry to emerge.
Twenty years is the regular cycle for any technology to make it from lab to market. We’re about on track with that.
I do not agree. Partially. This rule of thumb on technology maturation almost has no meaning for nanotechnology. There is a real question when it, formally, began,(see Drrs. Eric Drexler, MIT, and Richard Smalley. Rice U (deceased)) and when did it commercialize? We already enjoy some of the benefits from material science applications, but which did not popularize the term, e.g. Smalley used buckyballs, and fullerenes. And there has been a lot of unfulfilled hype, as JR notes.
The essential, implied, question is the title of the article. Is there a future career in nanotechnology, which is worthy of a decade of intense higher education? The answer lies in the science RD&D policies of the federal government, and MURIs (corporations and university spin offs). I do not know. I do know that who ever wins, owns the world. It is that big.
But I thought smart phones were now getting bigger, not smaller, maybe you need to recalibrate.
But seriously, what *are* you talking about? “Nanotechnology” is somewhat more vague than “green technology”. Generally if you mean industry needs more STEM workers especially in the hard sciences of chemistry, materials, and physics, then say so. But that would not ever seem to be a large employment category, so if you mean machine operators for 3D printers, well, how hard is that exactly? So no, you must mean something more like the CAD/CAM operators who design the stuff for the 3D printer to print. Right? Problem is wages for all STEM jobs are now bupkis as US industry imports cheap Indian H-1Bs and then moans that Americans won’t compete for the low salaries. If this is your real problem with “nanotech training” then I have no sympathy.
My brother signed onto an early “nanotech” medical startup that burned through about $50m, though it was pretty clear after the first $20m or so that the science wasn’t nearly there yet to support any kind of real engineering.
I’m sure the field has great promise, but please specify some macro-details.
I’m a medical lab technologist with a B.S. in chemistry, have used the mass spec for tox drug screens, am thoroughly familiar with clinical wet lab testing, and want to learn about the electronics of the equipment that we use.
I would love to learn how to multiply the accuracy and sensitivity of medical lab tests with nanotechnology, but there are no specifics in the article. Where is nanotech being taught in my field? It would seem that the advances must involve both the electronic equipment AND the chemicals applied to medical specimens. More details in the future, please!
Thank you for your comment, Anonymous. It comes from a person who is actually seeking further training in nanotech and not from somebody removed with an ideological point to make. Unfortunately, there are still not enough opportunities for further nanotech training, but as I point out in the article, that’s beginning to change. More is being offered at the community college and university level in New York state, North Dakota, North Carolina and Ohio. Contact your local colleges and demand training! Or find a local nanotech company and ask for an internship. Let them know there is a demand for training.