And local non-profit Women4STEM is looking to make sure local students and professionals are ready for it.

Next month, Women4STEM is set to hold its fourth annual conference on March 14 at the Weber State University-Davis campus in Layton. Conference registration is open for anyone from 7th grade up through professionals.

Women4STEM co-founder Alison Sturgeon told the Standard-Examiner that she started the conference alongside Kristen Keyes.

“We wanted to do something that would be inspiring for young people as well as a great place for professionals to learn from each other as far as maybe other areas of STEM they hadn’t considered or to meet other people for networking,” Sturgeon said. “It’s also a place where we can mentor some of the younger high school, junior high and college students so we can connect them with some of the professional people we have at the conference.”

She said that the conference has largely kept the same formatting since it was first held and will largely follow the same format this year with two keynote addresses that open and close the day and nine breakout sessions and lunch in between.

“We would like to out-grow the Weber State-Davis campus, but we haven’t yet,” she said. “We have grown a little bit year-to-year. This is our Year 4, but with the outstanding people that we have that come and give presentations and then the feedback that we’ve got from surveys, we just know that the conference is extremely valuable, very well received, is meeting its mission. Our biggest obstacle is getting the word out so that more people can come and benefit from the conference.”

Sturgeon said the conference draws, on average, around 175 participants each year.

“There’s a lot of excitement and there’s a lot of interest, obviously, in STEM and we’re glad that’s continuing,” she said.

She said conferences like this are taking on an increased importance as the world relies more heavily on STEM careers.

“Our world will always have technology and will always need people working in STEM,” she said. “We want to bring more of that to the world. We know doctors, we know lawyers, we know teachers and we know what they do — it’s pretty obvious. But so many people, especially young people, don’t really know, ‘What’s an engineer and what do they do? What’s a computer scientist and what do they do?’ It’s really valuable to have this exposure to many different areas in STEM just so they might decide this would be something they want to do for their career.”

For more information on the Women4STEM conference and to register, visit https://women4stem.rsvpify.com/.