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Episode 14 - Sarah Noble - How the RICS are creating awareness of the profession and how you can get involved
109 Plays2 years ago
In this episode we speak with Sarah Noble, Head of Early Engagement at the RICS.
Sarah head's up the drive to get kids aware of and engaged with the different routes into surveying. It's a tough role creating awareness of a hidden profession that doesn't have the same immediate awareness as building trades or professions such as engineering, law and medicine.
We discuss:
- What is early engagement
- The challenge of surveying being a hidden profession
- How to engage younger people with surveying roles
- Planning which pathways to promote based on expected future demand
- Measuring the impact of early engagement programmes
- Building relationships with organisations and teachers to help increase engagement
- How parents perceptions of surveying affect children’s choices
- How you can work with RICS to help promote the profession
Everyone can help to engage kids with surveying and each engagement, no matter how small, contributes to a big impact overall for the number of people pursuing a role on the profession. Have you considered reaching out to the RICS to see how you can help engage people at school level about what you do?
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Transcript
Introducing RSCS Initiatives
00:00:00
Speaker
So at the RSCS, we have been running some influencer sessions. So we hold them in the evening. We invite teachers, parents, carers. We tell the adults all about the profession, hoping that they're going to go way back into the classroom and talk to the young people about it. Welcome to Survey Booker Sessions. Tune in to hear from people working in a range of industries and roles to provide you ideas that you can take away and use in your own business. I'm your host, Matt Nally, the founder and director of Survey Booker, which is the leading CRM and survey management system for surveyors.
Sarah Noble's Career and Role
00:00:30
Speaker
So on this week's episode, we have Sarah Noble, who is the Head of Early Engagement and Enrolment at the RACS. So thank you for coming on, Sarah. Thank you for having me. Anytime. I think it's going to be a really interesting episode to cover sort of, you know, what you do and bringing people into the profession. But it'd be great if you could start off just by, I suppose, introducing who you are and what you do at the RACS.
00:00:54
Speaker
So my name's Sarah. I've been in the RICS since May of last year. So my previous role was actually teaching as a French and Spanish teacher.
00:01:04
Speaker
but I also worked as a careers leader. But prior to that, I had worked in industry. So I've worked in industry, gone into teaching, left teaching at the RCS. So I guess the link there is working with young people and ensuring they get the next best step. So yeah, I started in May. I oversee the early engagement and the enrollment team.
Raising Awareness in Education
00:01:22
Speaker
Those two teams are the first part of the membership journey. So early engagement, I'll go through the team in a minute, but that team goes into schools.
00:01:33
Speaker
colleges are offered T levels and level three apprenticeships, going to universities and other providers that provide level six apprenticeships and degrees and then globally we go into schools in the released and we go into universities in APAC in EMEA.
00:01:48
Speaker
And the idea is that we are raising awareness of RCS. We're raising awareness of surveying. In fact, there are 22 different pathways that could be building control. It could be planning. There are so many different niches as well, you know. So yeah, it's about getting young people, first of all, from school into the right A levels, from the right A levels or T levels into the right level six qualification, and hopefully then
00:02:14
Speaker
on to becoming an RCS member and enjoying their job for life. Awesome. There's a lot of aspects that I want to delve into, but one thing I'm really interested in, what took you from, I see the link obviously, but what took you from teaching into the RCS? So I had been teaching only for 17 years. I didn't start until I was 30, so it was a bit of a career change. I did, I absolutely loved it and I love working with young people.
00:02:43
Speaker
but I'll be quite candid with you. I was working from seven o'clock in the morning to 10 o'clock at night. And I was walking throughout my holidays and I just wasn't enjoying it anymore. And the RSCS position gave me a chance to still work with young people and still work with getting those young people into their ideal job in a job that they could thrive. I guess without the marking, the phone calls and the planning. So I've got more of a life balance.
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, I get that. I get that. Because I forgot for some friends that are teachers and yes, I take the mick out of them for their very long summer holidays. But I do see actually day to day they do work some very, very long hours, you know, planning and marking. And yeah, so it's an intense one for sure. But I still get the best of it because I still get to go into schools and present to children and I haven't got to mark their books.
00:03:31
Speaker
and we do visits for young people to our offices in Birmingham and in London, in Edinburgh, so we get cohorts of students come in, so I'll get the best of both worlds really.
Targeting Older Students
00:03:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's brilliant. So I suppose for context of the early engagement aspect, how early does early engagement start? I'm imagining it's not reception age, it's more secondary school, or is that completely wrong?
00:03:55
Speaker
No, well, I would love it to be reception and primary school. We are a very small team, so you've got to work with the resource you've got. So there's me head off, we've got a manager, we've got a school coordinator, a university coordinator, and an admin person in the UK. So we sat down, or I sat down when I joined RCS in Maine, thought, right, how can we capitalize on the small resource we've got? And there isn't a budget. We do want a shoestring, we use Goodwill. So it made sense for me, having come out of the school situation, having come out of education,
00:04:24
Speaker
I've worked with middle school, I've worked with high school and I just, kids are lovely, but they're space cadets. And they don't really start thinking about their future until they're in year 10 or 11. So in old money, that would be fourth form and fifth form. So 15, 16 onwards.
00:04:40
Speaker
So I decided to use a minimal resource we've got really well. So we go into year 10s, year 11s, year 12s, year 13s, 12 and 13s being sixth form. We talked to the year 10s and 11s about their A levels or T levels. And then we talked to these sixth forms about
00:04:56
Speaker
about the level six apprenticeships or the degree programs. It just means that we can talk to these young people about their next step and we can guide them. So for example, if you've got a sixth form of the one to do a level six, we can help them write the UCAS application or help them write their apprenticeship application. It just is a bit more tangible. Whereas, and I've done things with year fives and year sevens, you can have a really great session on surveying and you can get them to redesign a high street and have some good fun with them.
00:05:23
Speaker
they're not going to leave that classroom and do something meaningful without information.
Surveying: The Hidden Profession
00:05:28
Speaker
So it's about return on investment as well when it comes down to it.
00:05:32
Speaker
I think it's a really tough role because I remember it was a little while ago now but I do remember at school going through you know careers advice and stuff and I remember everyone kind of getting the similar response and it was a software program where to go on and you know get a spat out of a response at the end being like you should do this and I think all of us at the class of 30 were like well we seem to have covered about three job roles between 30 of us you know and there's nothing wrong with those job roles but obviously three roles weren't going to suit 30 different people and
00:06:02
Speaker
even now there's roles I hear about in different industries that you'd never know about and of course you can't educate people and everything but what are the type of reactions you get from people when you speak to them about it? Have many ever heard of it before? No, this is the issue, this is the problem.
00:06:22
Speaker
I mean, I probably didn't know much about surveying until I started working at RCS, you know, I bought houses, sold houses and encountered surveys doing level two, level three surveys, but that was about it. And most people think of an estate agent. Well, I mean, there are 22 different pathways. So the problem we face is it's very much a hidden profession. So if you say to a child, what do you want to do? If you get someone that wants to work in the built environment, they're thinking straight away, brick layers, roofers,
00:06:46
Speaker
electricians, plumbers, architects, but they will never say, oh, surveying sounds great. So moms and dads don't know about it, teachers don't know about it, the kids don't know about it. So one of our biggest challenges is because it's the teachers advising the young people, if a teacher's unaware of a profession, they can't advise that young person. But the problem with teaching,
00:07:12
Speaker
is honestly, it's so stressful. Your head is down and you are literally focused on hitting target grades. So, you know, your line manager is saying to you, I need X number of students to get an A or a B or a C. That's your focus. You're not really worried about the jobs your children can do after. You're worried about your exam grades. So it's about educating those influencers, we call them. So at the RSCS, we have been running some influencer sessions. So we hold them in the evening. We invite teachers, parents, carers. We tell the adults all about the profession.
00:07:41
Speaker
hoping that they're going to go way back into the classroom and talk to the young people about it. So yeah, kids just don't know about it. So they're in awe and they take less for granted, the buildings they live in, learning, working. So I try and say to kids, next time you walk down the street, try looking up, put your phone away, look at the buildings, because actually that built environment, a surveyor has had a hand in every part of that build cycle.
00:08:06
Speaker
That's an interesting point actually about looking up because this is the advice that I remember getting when I worked in retail years ago in food retail. And the inspection, you know, we walked around the store to have a look with your team and so on. And the one bit everyone forgot to do was look up, you know, you'd always be looking at what's things, what's on the floor, what's on the shelf, but you'd never notice what was a broken bulbs or stuff that sprayed somewhere.
00:08:31
Speaker
But it does relate to there's so much you miss out if you don't miss out on. Yeah, and just take for granted, you know, buildings have started. So our headquarters, for example, it's a beautiful building. And you walk past it. Well, in every city, there are beautiful buildings, but you just take them for granted. They've always stood there and they always will. Yeah, yeah.
Building a Talent Pipeline
00:08:52
Speaker
I think one thing
00:08:54
Speaker
I'd like to touch on is, so I was going to actually ask you about the influencer aspect in terms of, do you run, you know, training with the teachers, obviously, they can then pass that message on to more people. But is it difficult to get the message across when there's 22 pathways? I mean, I know obviously that there has to be because the built environment covers a lot of areas, but is it harder than to convey that? It is. And what we tend to do, because we're delivering our program on a shoestring, we tend to rely on our RCS members to be our ambassadors to go into schools.
00:09:23
Speaker
So you can only really promote the pathway or the profession of that ambassador. So for example, if I've got a quantity surveyor going into school, he or she is going to talk about quantity surveying and likewise building surveying.
00:09:36
Speaker
So we tend to get the most popular pathways, which is your Resi pathway, QS, BS, possibly geomatics and land surveyor, not so much. Recently we've had a minerals conference, so we've got lots of minerals and waste surveyors coming forward and saying they'd like to come in. What we really need to do is focus on where the gaps in the labour market are. So for example HS2 is behind schedule, partly because of budget, but also partly because they haven't had enough quantity surveyors to employ on the initiative. So what we need to do is
00:10:05
Speaker
and we haven't really, is we need to go away, really scrutinise that labour market information, find out where the gaps are and start saying to young people, what we're desperate for are 10,000 Conti surveyors or 150 land surveyors. That's something we're not doing. It's a bit ad hoc and we need to be a little bit more strategic about that.
00:10:25
Speaker
I imagine quite, I use the word interesting a lot actually, but it's an interesting one to go into in terms of there is a big lag between obviously speaking to people at school who are going through GCCs, A-levels, et cetera, and then finally coming into the job market. It could be eight years soon.
00:10:41
Speaker
Yeah, so it's an interesting one to plan and then start to see what the effects were. And I suppose it's, is it difficult to see what the effects are quite immediately in terms of what you do? Because there's that lag or do you start to see changes in the sort of types of applications people are going for early on in the process? When we're dealing with the level six, when we're working with our apprentices and our students on the RSCS accredited degree programs, we can see straight away the impact.
00:11:09
Speaker
So, well, not straight away, so I've only started in May, so this is a first academic year. But the attrition between students leaving the RCS accredited apprenticeship or degree course and going into employment and becoming chartered is huge. So our aim first and foremost is to ensure that more people come off those courses and apprenticeships, find a job and then go through the APC to become chartered. So that we should see pretty quickly. We should see those numbers going up due to the engagement we're doing.
00:11:39
Speaker
In terms of schools, that's going to take a long time. So what we are doing is all of the schools that we've seen this academic year, so from September 22 to July 23, we are going to maintain contact with those schools. We're going to go back in next year, the year after the year after, and those schools will be the, well, we hopefully will be the RSCS Talent Pipeline.
00:11:59
Speaker
because we're on friendly terms with the schools and the career leaders. Hopefully the career leaders will start saying to us, yeah, I've had five students this year that want to be surveyors. The following year there was seven. I've got more girls coming forward. I've got more kids from ethnic backgrounds, from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, because again, that's a real drive at the minute.
Breaking Stereotypes in Surveying
00:12:18
Speaker
Lots of engineers, sorry, not engineers, lots of surveyors are white middle class. There's nothing wrong with that.
00:12:26
Speaker
But if we are built environment for a diverse population, then that built environment needs to be built by people from a diverse background. Oh, completely. And that way you end up with better buildings because you consider more people's use cases with those buildings as well and the way they want to interact. One of my questions on the list is what type of actions do you get from people at different ages or different genders or ethnicities? Do you find people
00:12:57
Speaker
either have a different reaction to either awareness of it or whether they feel they could have gone into it. And therefore that engagement helps to break down a barrier that they might have had in their mind. Yeah, I think from the minute, when you're born, you're not aware of gender imbalance or gender specific behaviours. But as you grow up, you're told to behave a certain way. You're told to perhaps follow a certain pathway in life.
00:13:24
Speaker
So if I go to a careers fair, I'm thinking of one in my mind now that I went to, a lot of the young ladies were saying it's not glamorous. I don't want to be in a hard hat and muddy boots and in the rain, you know, I'm going to ruin my weave or I'm going to ruin my
00:13:38
Speaker
my curls or, you know, and it's trying to say to him, you can be both glamorous and a surveyor at the same time. And it's those perceptions. I think the other perception we often get from parents from ethnic minority backgrounds is that it's not akin to being an accountant or a barrister, and they want their children to go into a professional job. But it is, it's, you know, being a charter surveyor is akin to being a doctor or a lawyer or a barrister. And it's
00:14:06
Speaker
It's trying to, I guess, bust those myths so that the profession becomes acceptable to young people and to their parents, because parents ultimately have a huge impact. Oh, yeah. You know, so I've just funded more for the university. You know, I didn't want to let him have free choice of what he wanted to do. He's quite happy in publishing. But a lot of parents almost make decisions on behalf of their children and have dreams and aspirations on behalf of their children. So, yeah, it's about busting those myths, I think, and just saying, you know, actually,
00:14:34
Speaker
depending on what pathway you do, you could be schmoozing people over cheese and wine in a nice glamorous dress or suit. You could be driving a nice car. You don't necessarily spend your days in the rain or on a cold site. And I think, again, it's a passport to travel. A lot of our chartered surveyors have maybe gone out to Qatar, Dubai to work on these different roads. Yeah, that's one bit you forget, actually, is the doors it does open.
00:15:03
Speaker
One thing I was actually going to ask later on, but you touched on it a moment ago, was the fact that you, I suppose, have ambassadors from the profession that go out and help deliver stuff on the ground. So how can surveyors potentially reach out and what role can they fulfill in terms of day to day being able to go out and do stuff, go to a school? I mean, we've got, it's been phenomenal, the response, we've got about 450 of our members
00:15:32
Speaker
in the UK alone, who have stepped up and said, I'm more than happy to be an ambassador. So ambassadors, they could go into schools, they can go into T-level colleges, they can talk to apprentices, they can go talk to degree students. So they can physically go in and deliver a session. They can do something online if that fits into their busy working day. We've had members support us with the influencer sessions in the evening. So bless them, they've finished their busy working day. They've joined us at 6.30 to deliver an hour session to parents, carers and teachers.
00:16:02
Speaker
I've got surveyors doing mini videos for me. So I've got recently about five surveyors have sent me little videos, just 30 seconds long that we can use on Instagram, giving me three reasons why they love surveying. So that there are myriad ways that people can help. I'm in the middle of planning a sixth form competition for summer 24. We're going to be looking at surveyors to support that. So we're going to ask groups of sixth forms to come along, redesign a rundown high street,
00:16:30
Speaker
And the idea is each team would be allocated to Surveyor to assist. So we're gonna run those in our offices in Birmingham, London, Edinburgh, Cardiff. So Surveyors can come along and support that. So yeah, I mean, if Surveyors wanna get in touch with me, I'm happy to share my contact details with you. Yeah, it'd be brilliant, the more the merrier. And we just need, you don't need to have any teaching background. You don't necessarily need to be DBSed, you're not giving on your own with them, but just someone's got a passion to share their love for Surveyor.
00:17:02
Speaker
There's some very different ways you can engage with people, not just the traditional, you know, sound in front of someone, do a PowerPoint presentation and actually it's not, you know, there's value in that and you do have to do that sometimes, but I hadn't considered the very interactive version of, you know, redesign High Street and you could potentially have little models and, you know, there's different ways, different ways of actually making more engaging. I know most of work hybrid now, so I'm only doing two, three days in the office.
00:17:24
Speaker
If you are in an office or you're doing a site visit, call a student, and I'm thinking 16 plus for health and safety, come with you on that visit. So spend a morning with you, an afternoon. You can just spend a couple of hours, I'm not talking about a week's shadowing, but just a little bit of insight just so it can either say to this young person, that's definitely for me or no.
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah. You know, that's really insightful and useful. It brings it to life. And do you have sort of standard stuff that you can provide people with? They're going to do a talk in a school or something like that. They can be like a presentation deck or something like that. They don't have to come and create it all themselves. Yeah. So we've got a slide deck. It is an RSCS branded slide deck that people can tweak it, not precious. We've got a couple of little video clips we can share. So we've got some RSCS promotional clips.
00:18:11
Speaker
We've also got some students, not some students, we've got some young surveyors talking about how they got into the industry. We can share those. I'm trying to think what else we've got. And then activities. So what we normally do is we'll go into a school, deliver a slide deck, which is a bit boring, but afterwards do an activity with the kids. So we've got a few activities that we can say to surveyors. We can just take them off the peg, deliver those. Awesome, awesome. And then what,
00:18:41
Speaker
What misconceptions do you think members have around sort of what the RICS does around engagement and trying to get people into profession? Because I know there's discussions around potentially being an aging profession and all this kind of stuff, but I haven't heard much myself around perceptions of what RICS do or the RICS do around an engagement. But there are things you hear about that maybe you're wrong or? Whilst there is a lot of positivity and a lot of support, I think lots of members think we're not doing enough.
00:19:10
Speaker
I just want to reassure people that we are doing the best we can with the resource we've got. And we have got a small team, but we do leverage relationships with other groups. So for example, we've worked with the Girls Network, the Land Collective, Reach Out to Kids ROTK, Girl Guides.
Creative Collaborations and Challenges
00:19:29
Speaker
We try and piggyback as many youth organizations as we can. So whatever work they're doing, we're supporting it. So for example, Reach Out to Kids ROTK,
00:19:38
Speaker
They were already doing something with the Lord Mayor's Challenge in London. And I said, Denise, we've got a venue. Come use our headquarters. So they came and did their R2K event. But then they spent some time with me talking about RCS, talking about surveying. We did a tour of the headquarters. We've got a lovely roof garden that looks able to Westminster. So that was a really lovely afternoon. And that means also the schools that attended. I've said to the careers leaders that are comforting the children.
00:20:01
Speaker
let's keep in touch, let's do this every year. So we are, I just want to reassure people we are doing as much as we can with the resource and budget we've got, to spread the word. But if anyone's got any ideas how we can improve, how we can do more, I'm open to suggestions.
00:20:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's important. I think it's two way in terms of, you know, there might be someone that's done something somewhere and they go, actually, have you thought of this and that can be helpful. But I think it's I think often actually, by having a limited budget, you can come up with more creative ideas. And there's at the same time, there's no point trying to replicate an entire school system, are you having enough?
00:20:41
Speaker
you know people to go into every single school every day to talk about those things it just that would be misuse of budget on the on the other hand so it's it's using trusted sources that people like engaging with like the girl guides and stuff like that um people are potentially more happy to engage with that because it's people they listen to day to day and they trust and they absolutely yeah i think what i want to do more of is is to have a more joined up approach so i was talking to
00:21:07
Speaker
and steven from the real big real academy of assets i think it is and he represents property generally and what i would like to do is join forces with other professions and maybe go in with the engineers or going with the architects and spend a day in a school just talking about property in general yeah yeah
00:21:27
Speaker
because actually you might have an audience of 100 children, only three of those might want to be surveyors. And that's great, I'm happy with those three, but what about the rest of them? Because I don't need to tell you, the broad scope or range of jobs within the built environment is huge. There is something for every type of person, personality. So I think joining forces with other professions and strength in numbers is something perhaps we need to look at moving forward.
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. It's a very good idea that pooling resources, pooling ideas and networks. Yeah, definitely. I think the, just going back to one of the things actually mentioned earlier, that I think would be useful to look at potentially is, are there different challenges you've got in different parts of the different pathways in terms of some already actually very well engaged with and you get people coming through naturally? Are there others where
00:22:21
Speaker
I don't know enough of the pathways to suggest which ones, but are there certain areas, whether it's residential or commercial, where there's fewer people going through those routes and there's potentially more of a challenge in the future? I would say that's, I think residential is probably the most popular pathway than QSBS. I think it would be your land surveying, they're struggling to recruit onto courses and struggling to recruit into firms. And as I said, the mineral surveyor,
00:22:50
Speaker
And then there was another one the other day, I came across evaluation of business assets and business machinery. That's a dying pathway. And there will be, I think there will be huge gaps in the labor market soon if we don't make young people aware of these. And as you say, it's really hard. You can't go into school and go through all 22 pathways. The kids would be asleep. But yeah, just trying to get across that range of pathways within surveying. You know, even someone that deals with antiques, they could be a surveyor, valuing antiques.
00:23:19
Speaker
So it's wider than young people think, but it is really hard. I often think it'd be really good to have sort of one of those documentaries, you know, where they follow the ambulances round or they follow the police round, kind of a flannel that survey is, that'd be phenomenal. That would be actually, I wonder if anyone's thought of it. Yeah, I think we were approached, but it was one of those where you don't have any say over the final edit. And I just see the bloopers in and just, I'm not sure that would be great.
00:23:48
Speaker
It's a difficult one because on the one hand, you know that you're not doing anything that's wrong in terms of that therefore shouldn't affect the editor, but it's so easy to edit something out of context or put a different spin on something.
00:24:03
Speaker
So, um, and don't worry, this barely gets edited. So I've never seen it before. Um, but, um, yeah, no, that could, that could be interesting. Cause you do see a lot of these programs now, don't you? Whether it's, um, you know, the DIY SOS is I suppose one of the building side of things or refurb side of things. And then you've got your, you know, 999 traffic cops, all this kind of stuff. Um, so you've got homes under the hammer, but then that's a bit misleading. I think, you know, I remember when I was still in school teaching.
00:24:31
Speaker
And a couple of kids said, oh, I mean, so I just want to be a property developer. And they thought they were going to leave school and just develop properties like that. I don't think they understood that there was maybe a bit of a ladder to climb before they got to that point. And I think profits, they made a slightly inflated. But I think it's when you have been on.
00:24:52
Speaker
one side of a camera, you do start to see how some of it works and, you know, things are scripted slightly and, you know, it has to be entertaining at the end of the day at the same time. No, this is it. Now I get that.
Future Skills and Education Alignment
00:25:04
Speaker
I think that's been really interesting. What are your, I suppose, your goals with the role over the next few years? Are there sort of things that you're working towards in terms of new ideas and
00:25:20
Speaker
My main remit is to increase conversion to membership. Ultimately at the end of the day RSS has been around I think 154 years. So we want to make sure RSS is still around in another 154 years because you know it's about protecting the public in terms of living in safe and working in safe buildings. So the RSS is really important in terms of what it does.
00:25:43
Speaker
in terms of the early engagement team. So it is about converting people to members. It's about raising awareness of RCS as a brand. So even if young people aren't going to go into profession, are they going to use the brand when they buy and sell houses, et cetera, for advice about party wall, hedges, et cetera. And the economy of the next 10 years faces a real challenge in terms of de-skilling.
00:26:09
Speaker
In terms of the labour market, there are so many skills that are required to make sure that our building stock is fit for purpose, to ensure that we can rectory fit old buildings, to ensure that we can have safe, affordable building. So we're relying on that next generation of young people coming through to do that for us. But unless we start educating schools about the skills these young people need to fill these roles,
00:26:37
Speaker
then we're going to have to get our skills from overseas or our skilled workers from overseas. And I think the green economy is massive as well. It was going to be massive in terms of filling those roles. So about, you know, heat pumps, hydrogen fuels, boilers. We need people, young people coming through that can fit all these into our building stock as well. You know, looking at, I've seen these windows where they're not just windows, but they're solar panels as well. So it's having people being able to manufacture those, fit those. So it's about,
00:27:07
Speaker
making our young people and our teachers and educators aware of the skills that will be needed. And it's really hard because schools are preparing young people for jobs that we don't know about or jobs that don't exist yet. So it's making sure these jobs are the right skills as they come through so that our built environment is safe in their hands. It's a real challenge and it is one that RCS can't do on its own. And this is why I talk about maybe joining forces with other organizations to build environment to ensure that we've got
00:27:37
Speaker
workforce coming through that's fit for purpose, because at the minute, you know, a lot of deal of the younger generation, but a lot of kids are coming out of school with low skills. No, YouTubers, YouTubers can't build our next generation of buildings. That's a really good point. I think
00:27:59
Speaker
There's two challenges, I suppose. One is the rate of change and the acceleration of change in the types of materials being produced and technologies that are available and all that kind of stuff. But there is also, I suppose, a growing trend in being an influencer in terms of a social media influencer and that being perceived as an easy way to make money. Actually, you'll find some people will make a lot of money, but every man in this document can create a video.
00:28:23
Speaker
put it up there, but there is becoming a shortage of skills in a lot of industries because of that. I don't know whether there's a fear of hard work from some people and I don't think it's that so much. I can't quite put my finger on why there's maybe that situation happening where we are getting sort of dropping skills. Yeah, I don't think, what's the word I need? The education system isn't sophisticated enough
00:28:53
Speaker
the kinds of producing round pegs for square holes. Whereas the education system needs to work more closely with the world of work to ensure that the people that are coming out of the system
00:29:06
Speaker
are slotting into those gaps, you know, the NHS is crying out for workers, engineering, surveying, and somehow we're not getting it quite right. And that's a huge, you know, I can't fix that with this conversation. No, no, no. That's very, very high level. I spoke on that note then, did you get many opportunities to speak with government and politicians around
00:29:29
Speaker
how potentially you can work with them to, I don't know, influence what's discussed in schools and curriculum. Yeah, there are. I mean, there are lots of groups now. So I've got the CIC, the CLC. I had a meeting this morning with the CEC who went to Gatsby benchmarks and looking to fine-tune those two in careers education schools. So there are loads of groups out there plotting and planning
00:29:52
Speaker
but nothing's really putting place yet. So there are loads of conversations, but I think it's about, I think everyone's just struggling to pull everybody together in one place.
00:30:00
Speaker
So we just need that one thought leader to say, I'm the one to do it. Yeah, no, I agree with that. I think, so I suppose, yeah, I mean, there were a lot of challenges in terms of, you know, the RCS can't be expected to go and fix the school system, which influences lots of other things. Definitely not. But there's a lot, I think, from what you said that the members can help with in terms of a grassroots level, spreading the awareness and getting involved, which is quite exciting. It's about the circles of control and we can only do what's within our own gift, really.
00:30:31
Speaker
And if that is, if that one single gesture is that we can go into a school and deliver an assembly or a workshop, or we can mentor a young person, or we can create a 30-second video, if everyone has that one little gesture or that one little contribution, that together can have a huge impact.
The Role of Adult Guidance in Career Choices
00:30:49
Speaker
Yeah, and is the power of lots of small things coming together that make that big change? And so I suppose it's important not to feel that as a member, perhaps not to
00:31:01
Speaker
Not to think, oh, it's definitely someone else's job to go and do, you know, you can go and give at one hour a year. I do one presentation a year at school and every member did one of those and that would be a huge outreach and a huge awareness that would be generated. So it's, yeah, not feeling that it's, well, not my job, but also that the contribution you might have won't make much difference as a combined effort. Yeah, it's that ripple effect, isn't it? And I think just think about how lost you felt when you were 15, not knowing which way you were going to turn or
00:31:31
Speaker
Where would you be in 10 years? How are you going to rent a house, buy a house? I mean, I don't know. My husband always said that he was too busy worrying about his next football match, but I remember being 15 and completely neurotic and panicked and thinking, how am I ever going to adult? But yeah, it's scary when you're that young and you just don't know what your next step is. So if there was an adult there, just saying, well, this is a profession that I went into or it found me. I've really enjoyed it. This is why it could be that light bulb moment for that child.
00:31:55
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. I do remember it being quite difficult. I wasn't someone that knew what I wanted to do straight away. And it's tough, not tough, but it's, you feel more pressure when other people around you feel that they know what they want to do. They want to be a vet, they want to be a, I don't know, whatever it is, a journalist or I'm putting random things
00:32:16
Speaker
I think there's pressure from the adults around you as well, because adults want you to say, well, I want to know now, what are you going to be? And you have to think I'm 15. I don't know. So yeah, it is scary. So yeah, I've really enjoyed chatting today. It's been a lot of interesting topics and, you know, ideas and ways that people can potentially get involved. If people do want to reach out to you and learn about how they can potentially, you know, go and give a half an hour talk somewhere or get involved in some of the projects you're doing, how do they get in touch?
00:32:46
Speaker
So they can email me at snobel at rcs.org. Yeah, that's probably the most simple way to be honest. And I'll get back to them right away. So I'm always keen to grab a volunteer and take that opportunity. But yeah, I mean, if anyone's got a panacea for early engagement in filling skills gap, please let me know. I'm looking for the magic ones at the minute. Awesome. Well, hopefully we'll do another catch up soon and see how things progress since it's been since today. All right. Thank you. Thanks for coming on.
00:33:15
Speaker
Thanks for your time!