As Tom Friedman, author of "The World is Flat," has been saying, kids in the United States will be competing for jobs as adults globally, not locally.

 

How can young people best be exposed to the excitement and possibilities of knowledge-based jobs? One solution is Starbase Minnesota (www.starbasemn.org), a nonprofit organization supported by the Department of Defense that since 1993 has been giving grade-school kids practical experience in solving complex problems.

 

The Minnesota program (there are several dozen other Starbase sites nationally) trains more than 2,500 primarily inner-city kids from grades four, six and eight in science, mathematics and technology for improved academic and future success.

 

Participants in the Starbase summer program -- there is also a more extensive course during the school year -- spend seven days on the Minnesota Air National Guard base at Fort Snelling, where they design, build, test and launch a rocket. Teams build the craft, dividing responsibility for technology, engineering, finance and human resources.

 

They absorb these concepts by experimenting the way scientists and engineers do -- collecting data and costing out parts. They form a company, research rocket designs and experiment with fins and nose cones. Students are pre-tested for their baseline knowledge and tested again after the program to measure changes in knowledge, skills, attitude and career interest.

 

Each team presents a final rocket proposal on PowerPoint to the Starbase board of directors. I joined the board in July as an uncompensated director.

 

Along the way, they gain exposure to Newtonian physics; core engineering principles; computer-aided design (CAD) software; project management, and finance.

 

It is well known that a primary factor in a person’s career choice is the range of possibilities they are exposed to in their youth. For example, a child in a family of doctors will consider medicine an attainable profession.

 

Alternatively, consider the six Sutter brothers who played in the National Hockey League from 1976 to 2001. It is easy to imagine that Sutter brothers numbers four through six (Brent, Rich and Ron, according the Sutter Family Tribute website), felt little trepidation at the notion of playing professional hockey – it was the family business, after all.

 

Even though most high-paying jobs in the 21st century involve manipulating technical, financial or symbolic information, as well as managing projects and people, students often have no exposure to such tasks until they reach, or even graduate from college.

 

Professionals find these roles challenging and interesting. But they are not sexy or alluring, particularly from the perspective of a teenager. Engineering -- never mind finance or supply-chain optimization -- remains in popular culture the realm of nerds.

 

It is the rare child who grows up with the ambition of becoming a logistics engineer or working for a business process outsourcer.

 

Yet these jobs can be engrossing and exhilarating. Perhaps the most appealing role in the movie Apollo 13, aside from Tom Hanks as astronaut Jim Lovell, is Ed Harris as the unflappable flight director, Gene Kranz. Apollo 13 is an unusual movie for glamorizing the work of engineers and systems managers, who use their rigor and creativity to avert disaster and bring the marooned astronauts home.

 

Another Tom Hanks movie, Castaway, has Hanks as a Federal Express systems engineer stranded on an island, where the bulk of the movie takes place. The movie is unique for its beginning, which portrays Hanks as an enthusiastic globetrotting logistics consultant, evangelizing for increased efficiency at FedEx’s new Moscow hub, adjacent to the Kremlin.

 

I had the pleasure of attending the final session of several STARBASE summer classes, where I watched enthusiastic kids report on their individual projects in building and launching an actual rocket. They demonstrated their accomplishments in resolving a host of real-world work issues in engineering, statistics, budgeting and people management.

 

The ‘Return on Investment” to society in encouraging and developing our human capital is powerful. In his book “The Wealth of Nations”, Robert Reich, former Secretary Of Labor in the Clinton administration, wrote of the primacy of “symbolic analysts” in the knowledge economy, who manipulate information to solve problems.

 

Nearly a century ago, the Upper Midwest produced two pioneers of what became known as quality management -- W. Edwards Deming of Iowa and Joseph Juran of Minnesota. Their quantitative work in statistical process control laid much of the foundation for managing complex processes in large organizations.

 

Unfortunately, these men have a much higher popular profile in Japan than in the United States. For years, the Deming awards for corporate quality were broadcast on Japanese television.

 

It is critical that we provide kids with repeated opportunities to have cathartic experiences and “hear the music” of managing complex, large scale technical endeavors. Programs like STARBASE serve as a spark to light a fire for future Jurans, Demings, and Gene Kranz’s.