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Scottish Government to launch science careers campaign |
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Monday, 03 November 2008 |
Exclusive
By Cera Murtagh
The Scottish Government is set to launch a campaign targeted at young people to highlight the career opportunities available in science, Holyrood magazine has learned.
The Government is planning to launch the initiative in January to
communicate to teenagers and their parents the many career prospects
that exist in the field of science.
Professor Anne Glover, Chief Scientific Adviser for Scotland tells
Holyrood: “The other thing that we’re about to launch in January is a
campaign to highlight – particularly to school kids who are at the
point of making a decision about what they want to go on and study at
higher level – what scientists do. Because if I asked you: ‘what does a
scientist do for a living?’ you might come up with a description of
someone in a lab wearing a white coat, etc, etc. But actually, the life
of a scientist is incredibly exciting.”
This follows continued calls from the Scottish business community for
more science and technology graduates to boost the economy. A recent
report by FutureSkills Scotland indicated a shortage of science and
technology skills in Scotland, with 67 per cent of all vacancies in
science, engineering and manufacturing sectors classified as
hard-to-fill by employers – much higher than in the wider economy.
Glover believes the work of a scientist remains a mystery to many
people and the exciting opportunities of the profession need to be made
clear: “The world is a very small place when you’re a scientist. In the
science that I do, for example, I might have a colleague in Russia or
China or Australia or Brazil who I might work and correspond with, and
we might even end up being friends. So science is incredibly
international and it makes you very outward looking. And for most
people to travel as part of your work is very enjoyable and exciting.”
Science graduates have a broad range of career opportunities ranging
well beyond pure science, Glover adds. Many physics graduates, for
example, go on to work in high finance where their analytical abilities
are highly valued. “Your options in terms of what you do as a scientist
are very, very broad and it’s an incredibly creative thing to do but
that’s probably not the impression people have when they’re studying at
school. So I think we feel it’s important to try and highlight to them
just what scientists do and what sort of careers they have. [As a
scientist] there might be 50 or 100 different types of job that you
could easily do whereas an accountant might only be able to have three
or four jobs and a lawyer might have ten so it’s a really diverse
opportunity and I think we need to get that over more clearly,” the
professor says.
The campaign will target not only young people on the brink of making
career decisions but also their parents. It is important that parents,
who influence their children’s choices, understand what careers in
science entail, Glover explains: “I think we’ll actually have a media
campaign. I think we’d want it to be fairly high profile so that kids
are excited by it but also that their parents are excited by it too.
Because kids do listen to their parents sometimes when it comes to
thinking about careers and if you’ve got parents who haven’t been
involved in science then they might think: ‘oh, I’m not sure about that
as good future for you; I’m not sure how secure that would be’. But I
think parents in turn would probably value information about what that
means for their kid and the life they might have.
“So I think we want the campaign to be fairly broad to obviously target
kids who are making decisions about their future but to target their
parents as well, and maybe get more people more broadly just thinking:
‘Actually, science is really important. This plasma screen I’m
watching, that was made by scientists and engineers and technologists.’
We need to make science a bit more real for people.”
For full article, see page 38
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