A planning committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will organize two industry forums to understand how changes in the graduate student labor market will impact the capacity of the U.S. R&D enterprise to keep pace with innovation and maintain global competitiveness. The conversation series consisting of two 90-minute virtual meetings will focus on skill gaps and staffing demands related to the future STEM workforce and the upstream consequences for industry and innovation of STEM labor market changes. To capitalize on the critical role of private and industrial partners in these discussions, these meetings will ask leaders in industry directly what will be needed from graduate students now and for the next decade. It will ask leaders to forecast R&D trends in their sectors and project what types of students need to emerge from institutions of higher education to meet those emerging trends. A rapporteur-authored proceedings-in brief will be published summarizing both forums.