R&D: Skilled, Well-Educated Workers Wanted (and Not Just the Science Geeks)

(MoneyWatch) 

(Editor's note: This article is part of The Coming Job Boom, a BNET series about business trends that are shaping tomorrow's careers.)

How do you spell jobs? I-N-N-O-V-A-T-I-O-N. There is a growing consensus among economists, corporate chieftains, futurists, and even politicians that the U.S. economy needs a game-changing jolt of innovation — fueled by major investments in basic research — if it is to get through this recession and generate enough new jobs to put millions of unemployed Americans back to work.

“Some people have proposed a Manhattan
Project-like, crisis approach with a dramatic investment in green technologies
and renewable energy,” says Martin Grueber, research leader at
Battelle, a nonprofit research and development organization in Columbus, Ohio.
That may be more than a gridlocked federal government and recession-scarred
private sector can manage, but the renewed fervor for basic research is real.
Just follow the money.

Despite the deepest recession in a generation, R&D
budgets for many industries held steady through 2009 and in some
research-intensive sectors actually grew slightly. But it’s the
Federal government that is really ratcheting up the ante. The America COMPETES
Initiative of 2007 stated its purpose forthrightly: to increase the nation’s
investment in science and engineering research, and in science, technology,
engineering and mathematics education. The American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act of 2009, aka the Stimulus Package, pumped $19 billion into research.
President Obama’s proposed
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_key_innovation/">2011 budget requests $66 billion for all federal,
non-defense R&D, a $3.7 billion increase over 2010 levels.
Most important, these investments aren’t limited to the obvious
candidates: the green economy and biosciences.

“The green economy is not going to save every job
or put every person who’s unemployed back to work. Nor is biotech,”
Grueber says. “We have to be smart in the diversity of the bets we
place across the entire R&D portfolio, both within the federal
government and within the corporate environment. The new proposals are doing
that by getting back to basics,” which means funding a broad enough
range of basic research to maximize the possibility of finding the next
economy-building, job-growing innovations.

The America COMPETES Initiative, for example, is putting
href="http://www.osa.org/News/publicpolicy/documents/SUMMARY%20OF%20THE%20AMERICA%20COMPETES%20ACT%202-26-07.pdf">increased resources into the National Science
Foundation [pdf]. The Stimulus Package and Obama’s budgets
are pumping more money into NSF, the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST), and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. “These
three groups have the broadest portfolio of basic research, which lays the
foundation for a lot of innovations in a lot of areas,” says Grueber.
And, potentially, a lot of jobs.

In the near term, this focus on R&D funding will
boost high-skill, high-education jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects
that through 2018 the biggest jump in jobs — 82.8 percent —
will be in management, scientific, and technical consulting services. One of
the largest specialties in scientific and technical consulting services is
href="http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs037.htm">environmental
consulting services, in which firms identify and evaluate
environmental problems, such as the presence of water contaminants, and offer
solutions, often after inspecting the sites.

Not far behind is
href="http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs033.htm">computer
systems design and related services (45.3 percent), which is the
development of new computer systems, in areas from medical records and social
networking to security systems and gaming.

More than a third of new jobs created will require a post-secondary
degree. But don’t think of this as a jobs program for scientists and
researchers. Over the long haul, these investments will stimulate the kind of
economic growth that spreads jobs around.

American Electric Power Co. in Columbus, Ohio, had a
shovel-ready research project in the pipeline when the Stimulus Package passed
in 2009, and it has already begun to create jobs. “We got $334
million in stimulus money to put into operation a new technology developed by
Alstom Power in Paris, France, that captures the carbon emissions generated by
coal-fired power plants,” says Nicholas K. Akins, executive vice
president of generation at AEP. “And we’re building the
first commercial-sized capture and storage facility in the world at our
coal-powered plant in New Haven, West Virginia.”

It's estimated that over the next three years, the project
will create 800 high-wage, skilled construction jobs, such as boilermakers and
welders. After that, operating the plant will generate about 30 to 50 permanent
new jobs with wages in the neighborhood of $60,000 to $80,000 per year. “And
that’s just the one plant. If the regulatory climate changes, and we
think it will, there will be more of these at our other plants,”
Akins says.

The innovation push, then, will lead to jobs across the spectrum. The distribution of jobs within the U.S. workforce has been shifting toward skilled occupations for the past decade, with increasingly fewer manufacturing jobs, mining jobs and agriculture jobs. After this recession, it will change even more. The BLS is projecting fewer retail jobs, newspaper publishing jobs,
semiconductor manufacturing jobs. “Many jobs that were lost during
this downturn simply are not coming back, and many new jobs will require higher
skill levels,” says Rick L. Weddle, president and CEO of the Research
Triangle Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. So what will all those jobs be? “Something
totally new,” he adds, “something we haven’t
even thought of.” Something still cooking in one of those research
labs, perhaps.

More in The Coming Job Boom series:

• Healthcare: The Upside of an Aging Population — Plenty of Great Jobs
  
• The Smart Grid: Where Green Tech Is Serious About Hiring
• 
  
  href="http://www.bnet.com/2403-13070_23-406763.html">Financial Planning: Baby Boomers Need Money Advice. And They Don't Want It From Wall Street.
• Consulting: Those Companies That Laid You Off? They Want You Back, Sort of.