Redgate goes back to school
One of the things I’m most proud of about working at Redgate is that we don’t just focus on making money. That is (and should be) a critical part of why we are here but being a good company in the local area is equally important. So when it comes to helping out in the local community I think Redgate can be rightfully proud of the support it provides (Both to staff to represent Redgate with outside work projects and with the wider community by getting involved in events)
This week I attended a school leavers career day in Peterborough which was hosted by TCS (A subsidiary of TATA) and Diligenta. The event was attended by 6 local schools across Cambridgeshire to give them a flavour of STEM (Science, technology, engineering and maths) related work and to set them the challenges of solving a real world issue using digital solutions.
Its useful to know what the state of STEM related subjects is right now across our schools. With funding cuts and austerity. We’ve seen huge reductions in the capability and capacity of schools to provide a breadth of STEM based teaching and qualifications in our schools. Children now have to select the GCSEs they will do from a smaller pot of subjects (In many cases one or more of those STEM subjects aren’t even included), have a lack of qualified teachers to even teach some of these subjects (Computer Science is a primary example of this with not enough teachers coming through the system to teach it) and schools having to balance reducing budgets and changes in syllabus. All of this leads on to the fact that despite the UK needing over 100,000 new STEM qualified graduates each year, we’re lucky if we are hitting 50% of that number.
So companies are now trying to get involved to help support, educate and inform children on the vast array of career opportunities that are available via a qualification in a STEM subject.
The day itself started with an introduction from everyone and then a quick icebreaker for the children to get to know one another. This included finding out which people (including me) liked Justin Bieber (I don’t btw) and who had gotten up before 6am that day (Definitely me)
We then moved onto the bulk of the days event which was for each group to try to tackle a real world problem by using a technology or digital solution. My facilitation skills got a real working out over the day as I was tasked with judging how well the teams were working together (Considering skills such as team work, leadership, collaboration and presentation skills)
Teams had a number of real world problems they could attempt to solve, including food shortages, lack of medical aid and climate change. Each team had to come up with a solution to tackling one of these problems using a mixture of technology, a digital platform to provide the solution, consideration to the UX design of the solution and then put together a 2 minute presentation about their solution that they presented to the rest of the teams.
It was impressive to see the thought that went into tackling some of these problems and how some real consideration was given to designing solutions with the user front and centre of their minds. One of the teams who were designing an app for OAPs to arrange transport (They called it Taxifi) discussed how to make the app usable for older people by increasing the size of the buttons and simplifying the layout of the app (We may well have some future UX Designers here!)
At the end I was asked to judge the winners and it was a real challenge to pick a winner with so many great ideas. In the end I went with the food bank solution which involved volunteers being able to use an app to donate food to food banks and then arranging for a drone to collect the food from their doorsteps — be on the lookout for this becoming a real solution in the near future as it sounds like it has real potential!
As well as the main event I also took part in a Q&A with the schools where they asked me questions about how I got into my own IT career and what it was like working at Redgate. Needless to say I’m expecting a flurry of applications from the Cambridgeshire area over the next few years from some of these kids 😊
The lasting impression for me from the day was the fact that in a room of approx. 70 children, at least 40% of them were girls. Our industry has a real problem with gender diversity, the key is for schools, colleges, universities and employers to make sure that 40% doesn’t become 30, 20 or 10. With events like this and trying to plant that seed of STEM subjects being great careers to get into, hopefully we’ll see those 40% becoming the engineers, analysts, project managers and CEOs who will be driving our industry forward in the next 10–15 years.
My thanks to Redgate for supporting us by giving me and some of the product teams the chance to do these events. Its incredibly important and is a real benefit of working here.
