STEM Ambassadors are a fantastic resource for schools wanting to support their students’ careers education – helping them to find out more about the different options available to them after school.
Most secondary schools and colleges will be focusing on their careers education in the Summer term, but it could be all year round. This could be with assemblies about your job, careers fair style events where students meet multiple STEM Ambassadors, or helping with activities such as mock interviews or CV writing workshops. Browse the opportunities on the STEM Ambassador platform to find an activity suitable for you.
These types of STEM Ambassador activities are perfect for both new and existing volunteers!
- Talk about your own experiences when you were at school and how they led to where you are now (e.g. you enjoyed maths at school so you continued studying that and now you are an accountant).
- Explain any jargon or technical language you use. Many younger students might not have looked into university or post-16 choices yet, so will need some terms explaining.
- If you’re talking about a certain profession, try to research different routes into the role before you attend an event. For example, many students now undertake degree apprenticeships to become Civil Engineers where traditionally this may have been a University-only career.
- If you’re talking to small groups of students, think about what you could take with you to make your session more interactive, such as a piece of equipment that you use in your job or a photo that can spark questions and conversation.
- If you’re using a PowerPoint to present to students, remember to include lots of images that help to demonstrate your points.
- Consider discussing what you do on a day-to-day basis. Lots of jobs can be quite abstract to students if they don’t know what they entail, so talking about the meetings you attend, and documents you work on, can help bring this to life.
- To encourage questions, you could start the ball rolling with a few to the students, such as “Do you want to work in a team or on your own?” to get them thinking.
For careers fairs, it’s great to have resources that you can take along with you. Below, you can find a downloadable name card to put on your table, a list of resources we suggest for posters and leaflets that you can download if you want to take anything with you, and a list of questions that students can ask you. This is one of our favourite ways to engage young people; cut the paper up into strips so that there is a question on each piece of paper. Place the questions in a mug or cup on the table, and ask students to pick one out and ask you the question – this can act as a great ice breaker.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the London team at london-hub@stem.org.uk.
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