Geography can take you places: Careers with Geography

Last week I was part of a team leading an ‘Insight to Geography’ day at the University of Manchester for a group of Year 10 Gifted and Talented students. One of the sessions focused on careers with Geography. It was really rewarding to talk so many students who wanted to continue to study Geography and one day end up in a career that uses. It. Some of the key points I tried to get across (using some of the fabulous careers resources from the RGS and GA):

There are a whole range of skills developed through the studying of Geography

• Knowledge of cultural, political, economic and environmental issues, from local to international level.
• Appreciation of diversity, issues of globalisation, environmental sustainability, multiculturalism and citizenship (people and places).
• Project management including planning, execution and evaluation; this involves skills such as time-management, risk-assessment, problem solving and analysis.
• Integrating, analysing and synthesising complex and diverse data (text, numbers, images and maps). Well-developed literacy, numeracy and graphicacy skills.
• Complex ‘real-world’ nature of subject requires geographers to be flexible and adaptable – confidence and initiative to deal with the unexpected.

We used the list of careers that use skills developed in Geography from the Geographical Association (available from the GA here), combined with some of the career destinations of Manchester Geography graduates to try and highlight as many options as possible. By giving the students packs containing all the potential job titles on small pieces of paper, and some categories to sort them into (Society, Business, Environmental etc) they had a chance to sort through and discover careers they perhaps didn’t even know existed.

If you want to find out more about Careers with Geography visit:

The Royal Geographical Society:

http://www.rgs.org/OurWork/Study+Geography/Careers/Careers+with+geography.htm

The Geographical Association:

http://www.geography.org.uk/resources/careers/

To see some example jobs related to Geography available at the minute visit Earthworks jobs:

http://www.earthworks-jobs.com/geog.htm

 Geography can take you places..

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