Talent Ecosystems: Building a Scalable National Security STEM Workforce

The high speed growth of advanced technologies creates a major advantage for the United States, but it places great pressure on workforce development.  Despite heavy U.S. investment in STEM talent, too much falls through the cracks. The problem is not a lack of STEM programming. Across the country, high schools, community colleges, universities, community organizations, government agencies, and industry engage in STEM training, education, internships, scholarships, and certificate programs.

Despite their widespread reach, these talent development efforts do not add up to a coherent system that can meet demand. Too often, they operate in isolation. Some may succeed individually, but the connections among them are often weak, informal, or dependent on individual relationships.

When it comes to our national security, we can’t allow for gaps. The Department of War (DoW) and the defense industrial base (DIB) draw from the same STEM talent base and depend on institutions and communities beyond the defense enterprise to develop that talent to be mission ready. No single school, university, company, or government program can develop the talent to achieve readiness.

But designation alone does not create an ecosystem. The harder question is what regions need to do once they have that signal. How should regional entities organize, coordinate their activities, and sustain those connections over time?

Our research begins to make that idea actionable. Regional STEM ecosystems are interconnected networks of educational institutions, industry, government organizations, informal learning spaces, community organizations, and other partners that collectively develop talent. These ecosystems have emerged in certain pockets across the country and must now be leveraged as scalable and sustainable components of national-security workforce infrastructure.

Congress has directed the Department to evaluate how ecosystems can be leveraged strategically to meet DoD and DIB workforce needs.  Regional economic development centers should not miss the opportunity to build or reinforce their networks and ensure their congressional delegations are informed.

The term “talent pipeline”, while commonly used to describe recruitment and investment in STEM talent, fails to capture how talent behaves. People move through different combinations of education, research, internships, apprenticeships, military service, and career transitions before entering the DoW or DIB workforce. They may also move between government, industry, and academia over the course of a career.

DoW and the DIB already invest across the talent lifecycle, from early STEM engagement and scholarships to internships, recruitment, and employment. But when these efforts are treated as points along a straight pipeline rather than nodes in a connected web, gaps emerge.

The gaps between workforce development programs and employment opportunities create a talent valley of death where students lose their way, educators miss workforce demand signals, employers engage too late, and the talent shifts away from the national security mission.

Consider the traditions of shipbuilding on the Gulf Coast and cybersecurity in Northern Virginia. A shipbuilding ecosystem connects shipyards, Navy organizations, community colleges, universities, workforce boards, and training providers. A cybersecurity ecosystem connects federal agencies, universities, technology firms, and other regional partners. Same talent challenges – dynamic needs and workforce shortages -- different talent ecosystem.

Research conducted by the Systems Engineering Research Center supports an ecosystem approach. In work commissioned by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, we examined how the DoW and DIB collaborate in STEM education and workforce development in various regions across the country.

We found a landscape rich in individual activities, but collaboration remained largely informal or episodic rather than sustained and systematic. Those findings led us to examine how regional STEM ecosystems connect these otherwise fragmented efforts.

Omaha shows what this can look like in practice. The Omaha STEM Ecosystem emerged from a regional workforce challenge: technology and manufacturing employers, including data centers and advanced-fabrication firms attracted by Nebraska’s relatively low utility costs, struggled to find enough local STEM talent, while existing STEM programs remained fragmented. Rather than create another program, the region connected what already existed. Founded by the University of Nebraska Omaha and Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium, the ecosystem now includes more than 900 partners across education, business, nonprofit, and government. A full-time director, executive committee, action committees, and community platform provide the governance, coordination, and connections that help those organizations work as an ecosystem rather than as isolated programs.

What Omaha illustrates is not a single organizational model, but a set of functions and relationships that enable regional actors to work as a system. To capture those functions, our research developed a common reference architecture for regional STEM ecosystems. A reference architecture identifies the essential functions and relationships of a system without prescribing a single organizational design. It gives regions a common framework for understanding what a functioning STEM ecosystem needs while allowing them to determine which local organizations are best positioned to perform those roles.

If federal designation or another national-security signal gives a region a reason to organize, the architecture helps answer the next question: organize how? The reference architecture identifies seven core elements: governance, a common agenda, diverse partners and stakeholders, mutually reinforcing activities, backbone support, continuous communications, and shared measures.

Governance and Preconditions for Collective Impact. Regional STEM ecosystems need influential champions (e.g., a university president, major employer, or senior government leader) along with adequate and sustained resources and a shared sense of urgency. Governance should bring together representative leaders who can set direction, sustain engagement, and build trust across sectors.

Common Agenda. Partners need a shared vision for change and a joint approach to addressing it. For example, a region might align around shortages in cybersecurity or advanced manufacturing, while allowing schools, employers, and community organizations to contribute in different ways.

Partners and Stakeholders. Ecosystems depend on organizations with complementary roles: K–12 schools and universities educate and develop talent; employers provide career exposure, internships, mentors, and jobs; community organizations and families support access and participation; and government and philanthropy can provide resources, convening power, and policy support. Students and educators remain central stakeholders because the ecosystem ultimately succeeds only if they do.

Mutually Reinforcing Activities. Partners should not all do the same work; they should contribute differentiated activities that connect and reinforce one another. A high school STEM program, for example, becomes more powerful when it connects to a community-college or university pathway, employer-supported experiential learning, and a visible route into employment.

Backbone Support. A functioning ecosystem needs dedicated capacity to coordinate activity, convene partners, manage communications and data, and mobilize resources. That backbone helps collaboration persist beyond individual relationships or one-time projects.

Continuous Communication. Regular communication helps partners build trust, identify opportunities for collaboration, share progress, and communicate the ecosystem’s value. This might include recurring partner meetings, shared digital platforms, newsletters, or other mechanisms that keep schools, employers, community organizations, and funders connected.

Shared Measures. Ecosystems need common measures to track progress and learn what is and is not working. These might include measures of student participation and progression, internship or apprenticeship access, transitions into employment, employer demand, and access to opportunities for underserved communities.

One ecosystem is not a template for all. Existing ecosystems differ in geography, industry composition, educational institutions, workforce needs, leadership, resources, and maturity. What works for shipbuilding may not work for cybersecurity, microelectronics, or contracting. Variation is the point. The architecture provides a common set of functions, but each region must determine how best to organize around its own assets, gaps, and workforce needs. DoD/DoW needs to develop a strategic approach to leveraging the strength that comes from this variation.

Individual programs still matter, particularly when they begin to connect pieces of the talent system rather than address only one stage of the pipeline.

The larger opportunity is to connect efforts like these within regional ecosystems so that programs reinforce one another rather than remain isolated talent islands. STEM programs already exist. The talent is eager. Now is the time for the Department to take a strategic approach to building the connective infrastructure needed to translate those assets into workforce readiness across the DoW and DIB.

Dr. Payuna Uday is a Research Scientist with the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), a university affiliated research center, which includes the Acquisition Innovation Research Center (AIRC), where Karen Thornton is a Fellow. The SERC/AIRC is housed at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.