STRATEGIC VIEWS INTO THE PROFESSION – SUPPORTING THE GEOSCIENCE COMMUNITY RESPONSE TO CHANGE IN THE ECONOMY, COVID, AND CLIMATE

The Workforce Program at AGI began in 1955 with a goal of tracking the supply of students and capacity of geoscience programs across the United States. The scope of tracking slowly expanded over the next decades, but in the 1990s, the Workforce Program started to also provide intelligence to the community on emerging trends that impact geosciences as a profession. We review this path towards intelligence-providing, looking at the cycles of employment through boom and bust, the long-term dynamic changes of drivers of geoscience employment as our uses of resources evolve, and how the community is shifting from reactive to proactive in its educational strategies to improve the disciplines agility at educating the next generation of geoscientists. With the onset of COVID and a deepening societal recognition of the imperative of accelerating to a sustainable economy, the geosciences have encountered new, rapid challenges. COVID has accelerated a number of changes in education and the way geoscientists work. And now the need to become a core partner in sustainability is challenging the geosciences to move from just defining and describing the Earth system, but also to being part of the solution providing teams.