Tomorrow's water experts: advice from the youth panel
The Youth Panel (2024–2025) has produced a report on the future shortage of water experts. They examined how Noorderzijlvest Water Authority could help through education. Fewer and fewer young people are choosing to train as water experts. This is a problem for the water authority: soon there will be a severe shortage of new personnel!
Advice on increasing brand awareness
The recommendation was not to focus on changing the curriculum, but to increase brand awareness. This could include offering traineeships, giving guest lectures, helping students choose a course, and working together with student associations.
This advice was discussed during a meeting with the dyke reeve and the executive secretary. The young people concluded that the problem lies not with the curriculum, but with promotion! Following this discussion, a proposal will be submitted to Noorderzijlvest Water Authority to allocate more funds and personnel to education.
“We really enjoyed putting together this report and advising the board! Everyone in the youth panel is in education, either as a pupil or student, and feels involved in this topic. That made it easy to work on,” said Jan and Pleun from the Noorderzijlvest Youth Panel.