A great topic for discussion, Dave.
Here I see two forces moving in opposite directions: the employers' idea of a lack of hirable talent, and a large percentage of STEM graduates available for work. (Did you catch this statistic from the article: between 2010-2020 in the US, there are projected 2.5 million STEM job openings, but the number of STEM graduates is greater than 3.8 million people!) Clearly STEM graduates are not finding STEM jobs, or positions looking for talent would be filled.
What can we do? I love two suggestions from the article: a focus on professional development and stopping intuition-based hiring.
In my experience encouraging an employee's career development is hard, and time-consuming. When faced with immediate needs and company growth goals, I feel that development gets moved to the bottom of the list subconsciously. In the same way that some PIs don't really understand how to help a student choose a career, some managers leave development for a once-yearly performance review.
Stopping intuition-based hiring is another very slippery subject, but I think there's a large upside to both the economy and the company.
I'm thinking back to a controversial piece of writing from a small-company software CEO Brooke Allen: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire
https://web.archive.org/web/20160304022853/http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234In the 2000s, he gauged the interest of his applicants, but not their resumes. He trained applicants in a computing language, gave them a real-world problem, and then, most importantly,
promoted them to his colleagues after he saw their interest. Many of his applicants would have been otherwise rejects: new graduates, career changers, minorities. If he couldn't hire them, he was able to get them offers from other companies.
Is this optimal for the life sciences? Maybe not, and I can't advocate for giving someone homework without compensation. But such a radical approach like this might be what we need to break free of the opposing forces that keep the "talent storage" stuck.