This afternoon I’m on a panel called Breaking Barriers: Women Redefining Careers in Trades, STEM and Design as part of the Ballarat Job Expo. I’ve been given two questions ahead of time so thought it would be best to do a quick run through now rather than on stage in front of 300 people.
The first question is about creativity and innovation and why these are valuable skills regardless of industry. ‘Creativity’ is just a fancy way of saying someone is a problem solver. Innovation is what happens when creative people are given the time and resources to bring their solutions to life. As a graphic designer and self-proclaimed creative person I can’t imagine doing any job without being creative about it. Even when I was washing dishes when I first arrived in Australia, I passed the time by testing how efficiently I could pack the dishwasher while still getting the best cleaning result.
People who claim to not have a ‘creative bone in their body’ are lairs. Everyone has the capacity to be creative, it just appears in different areas of our life depending on the person. If you’re lucky you get paid for being creative. If you're not then it's more likely to appear in the things you do outside of work. One of the biggest and most underpaid of creative endeavours is being a parent. Never has there been such a role that required the ability to generate novel and useful ideas, combine existing concepts in original ways, or develop new solutions to problems - these being the very definition of creativity.
From an employer's perspective, employing young creative people is a competitive advantage, if they’re willing to support that creativity to develop into innovation. Workplaces across ALL industries are in a flap about AI and how it is going to change their business. Young people are earlier adopters of most new technologies - by the time the adults have figured out what’s going on, young people have already left and moved on to the next thing.
Being a problem solver is a skill that every industry needs. Finding an industry or role that sparks an interest and is worth working hard for is going to be the toughest decision for a young person right now.
The second question asks what I’m hearing about young people’s aspirations for the future, and how can we better encourage girls to explore STEM and design careers? Since we had 50 Year 9 students at the Tech School yesterday I took the opportunity to ask a bunch of them what their aspirations were. At first they all said they wanted to make money. When I asked how, a few professions started to pop up. Be a teacher, a lawyer and physio therapist. When I asked what they were worried about, the first thing was AI.
Interestingly there were quite strong opinions for and against. Students were either not using it and actively discouraging their peers not to or they LOVED it and couldn’t get enough. Further probing revealed that parents had a heavy influence on this outlook with AI adjacent jobs like software developer, creating more excitement around the positive possibilities of AI.
Students were worried that AI would take their jobs. They couldn’t tell me the exact jobs they thought were going to be taken by AI but they expressed fear around the uncertainty of not knowing what the job landscape will look like by the time they reach it. They're worried that they’re not going to earn enough money. The housing (and cost-of-living) crisis is weighing heavy on these young people. We forget that most of the people having these conversations, especially in the media, are adults who own a house but these young people are listening to this conversation realising we're talking about them. ⅓ of Austalians are renters and that number is only increasing. These students are worried they're not going to earn enough money to live ‘well’.
Another concern is a student would pick the wrong path and end up doing a shitty job they hated. This is probably a lot of young people's fear - what if I get it wrong? This is where being creative is going to be key because you can get it wrong. In fact getting it wrong is sometimes the only way you can get it right. Being adaptive and harnessing all the lessons from each experience is how we create an interesting and fulfilling life.
Getting more girls in STEM is luckily what I do for a job. You don’t know what you don’t know - it's that simple. We need to expose young people, not just girls, to as many occupations and industries as possible. When I went to school I didn’t even hear the word ‘engineer’ mentioned. Now we run a 4 day long program that gets on average 10 engineres across different fields to talk to our students about what they do for a living. They’re problem slovers by the way, just like designers are, and dentists, and event managers… Enticing students into a STEM career is making it real - not putting it on a pedestal but making it accessible and interesting and fun, hopefully our panel today will help do that.
My biggest advice I’d give to a young person today would be to be curious and never stop being a student. The more you learn about something the more you understand how little you know. A growth mindset is super power that will constantly reveal and attract opportunities. I wish I’d understood the power of that when I was at school.
