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 looked at how the Noorderzijlvest Water Authority can 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 major shortage of new staff!
Advice on increasing brand awareness
The advice was not to focus on changing curricula, but to increase brand awareness. This could include offering internships, giving guest lectures, helping with study choices, and collaborating with study associations.
This advice was discussed during a meeting with, among others, the dike reeve and secretary-director. The young people concluded that the problem lies not with the curriculum, but with promotion! Following this meeting, a proposal will be submitted to the Noorderzijlvest Water Authority to allocate more money 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.