The paradox of the modern labor market, when there is a shortage of engineering and technical personnel in the presence of a sufficient number of graduates of technical universities, is associated with a deformation of demand: only those specialists are in demand, which are either economically unprofitable or impossible to replace with technical devices, since so far artificial intelligence is not capable of creative creating innovations. The problem is that there are disproportionately few well-prepared schoolchildren among applicants to technical universities, and among university graduates there are many who have chosen a career outside the STEM sphere. There is no shortage of engineers, there is a shortage of highly qualified creative specialists. To train such specialists, it is necessary to increase the inflow of the most talented and creative students to technical universities, and then keep them in the STEM sphere. To test the hypothesis that a good way of attracting young people to the choice of an engineering career is to endow students with successful experience of technological invention, courses "Techno-Startup"for schoolchildren and "Technoinnovation"for students of technical universities were developed. The objectives of these courses are: to give students the experience of creating techno-innovation, to increase the motivation for a career in STEM among the most prepared students, to form critical thinking. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.