TIAH attends New Scientist Live in Manchester

I attended the New Scientist Live event at Manchester Central with our Careers Officer Louisa Baker. We were joined on the final day – which was specifically for school groups – by TIAH’s Membership and Business Development Manager Tess Howe.

TIAH had space within the Farmers Weekly The future of food and agriculture area on the show floor. In the same area there was a brand-new Massey Ferguson 8S tractor; an autonomous drone; a robotic milker and an example of vertical farming, using basil plants.

Our main purpose was to find out what people understood about farming careers. We wanted to know if they had considered a career in farming and how they related farming to STEM-based careers. We were also keen to learn if they had any preconceptions about farming, involving issues like diversity and working alone and if they thought you needed to come from a farming family to get into the industry.

We engaged with people passing our stand and asked them a series of questions to understand their career information needs. The information gained will be used to ensure TIAH is designing the best possible careers information to encourage more people to enter the farming sector.

It was really all about sparking conversations to give us insights.

We spoke to young people who were thinking about their future and to some older people who were considering changing their career. We also spoke to influencers, such as family members and professionals like teachers and careers advisors.

We asked questions, such as ‘Have you ever considered a career in farming?’ With the professional influencers, we asked things like ‘When you talk about careers to do talk about careers in farming?’ and ‘Have you been asked about careers in farming?’

Other questions included: ‘Do you think about farming as a science and technology-based career?’ and ‘Do you think of farming as offering a broad range of roles and careers?’ 

We also asked people if they thought farming helped with food security and sustainability.

It’s important with careers information that it is not all purely factual – people also want what I would call ‘career stories’, things which might motivate them to find out even more about a career in the sector.

We asked people what motivated them about a career – was it salary, doing something for society, the work-life balance? As people were answering the survey it came across very strongly that it was prompting them to think more about what is involved in farming and farming careers.

We also had a ‘coin drop’, which asked: ‘Do you think that farming includes science, technology, engineering and mathematics?’ They could answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on which slot they dropped their coin. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, who was being escorted around the event, was one of those who took part.

The event was extremely busy but there was still time for us to speak to fellow exhibitors in the Farmers Weekly area and to make contacts with whom we can follow up with initiatives in the future.