As well as providing a volunteer mentor for every care experienced young person in Glasgow, Young Glasgow Talent is committed to delivering Talent Tasters. Along with the support of our phenomenal partners, businesses throughout Glasgow are introducing our young people to the working world. Exploring a field they’d like to work in.
These Taster opportunities build on the proven success of our volunteer mentoring programme by offering S3 and S4 young people the opportunity to try their hands at the jobs of their choice.
At the start of June, the Talent Taster team made contact with Sweco – a global engineering giant. Sweco are the force behind some of the world’s most impressive engineering projects including Colombo Port City in Sri Lanka and Gotgatan in Stockholm as well as involvement in some more local projects such as the Queensferry Crossing and the Kelpies.
This company very kindly offered to open the doors of their Glasgow offices for our young people during ‘Inspiring Tomorrow’s Engineers’ week in November.
Emma, from YGT’s Talent Taster team, went along to the first session on Tuesday 8 November run by Sweco’s Geraldine Angus.
Emma said: “Geraldine, Sweco’s Operations Manager, did an amazing job designing a session that would excite and engage our young people.
“She organised challenges for the young people to complete including tangram puzzles and building bridges from spaghetti, string and tape.”
“Finally, she focused on all the routes into engineering which our young people could take. I feel it was really important for the pupils on the session to know that they don’t need to be a maths genius to make it in engineering.”
Geraldine said: “I was delighted to be given the opportunity to inspire the next generation into engineering and the world of Sweco as we build and design the cities and communities of the future. Hopefully our team has sparked an interest and understanding in the attendees of the varied careers available within engineering.”
And the young people had a ball! All of the students who attended a session have now said they’re interested in following it as a career – and what a rewarding career!
“My favourite part of the taster was learning so much about engineering”
“I was learning about types of jobs in engineering I didn’t know about. One of them is something I would be interested in.”
“The challenges were fun.”
A boy from one of our schools now has a clear career path thanks to the taster. He said the best part of the taster for him had been: “Getting to know more about Sweco because it has helped me know what I want to do when I leave school.”
We can’t thank Sweco enough for the time, effort and energy they put into their Talent Tasters.
We have more young people signing up for Young Glasgow Talent’s help. They need mentors to make a huge difference to their confidence, educational outcomes and future life chances. Can you help them? Find out more about Becoming a Mentor.
Can your organisation help? To become involved in our Talent Taster programme, alongside our partners such as The Herald, simply Get Involved.
We’re always looking for new mentors to reach all the new young people who are coming on board with the programme. Help us spread the word by letting your friends and family know how worthwhile mentoring can be!
