Careers and volunteering

Career development and volunteering opportunities with CSES

As it enters its centenary season, CSES (Chelmsford Science and Engineering Society) is looking for new volunteers to grow the core team and drive forward its recently launched strategy.

Are you looking for an opportunity to develop your career beyond the immediate day job? Perhaps you have some time to spare and would like to spend it supporting a local charity? Or do you enjoy volunteering for STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education and would like to be more involved?

This is an excellent chance to make a real difference to our community. CSES volunteers actively contribute to, and influence, what goes on locally by representing a respected body and working with a wide range of other organisations, including local government, the education sector and businesses. It is also a chance to grow your network, whether personal or professional.

Remember: any time spent volunteering for CSES counts as Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and is a perfect complement – or coda (we know plenty of retired people enjoy this sort of thing!) – to a career in the STEAM or education sectors. We are already affiliated in some way with many local employers – and want to build relationships with more – working with us is good for your progression and employment prospects.

There are three specific areas where we are looking for more people:

Read on to find out more about each of these. We are also always looking for people who can help in a more ad hoc capacity with specific projects and events.

If you are at all interested or would like further information, please contact us.

Strategic development group

SUMMARY:

• Seeking excellent career progression opportunity?
• Passionate about the 'big issues' such as net-zero carbon and use of data / AI?
• Help us to map out the major issues and bring the right private and public sector partners together to drive change within Essex.

A key part of our strategy is to refresh, strengthen and grow our relationships with local businesses and major public sector partners. This is (a) to secure the long-term future of CSES and (b) so that we can bring together a diverse team to tackle some of the really important issues facing Essex to which science and technology are critical. For example: how do we deal with mistrust in vaccines, and what must we do to prepare for the transition to electric vehicles and a net-zero carbon economy? This is an important part of our mission to advance the public understanding of science and technology.

To do this, we need a strong core team of driven people who can identify and map out these issues, research into them, find out the state of play and work out who in Essex is (or may be) interested in them. The strategic development group’s job is then to start building links with the businesses and organisations concerned, bringing them together at discussion / working group events and, ideally, engaging them as CSES Corporate Members. In the longer term, we would like to extend our "My Smarter Essex" format of short conferences to fuller events focused on the key topics.

We are looking for people to join this team and lead on various aspects of the work.

Sound interesting? This is a particularly good opportunity if you are looking to progress to a senior role in your career (perhaps in corporate strategy or engineering leadership), or indeed have already done so and want to grow or refresh your network.

We are also in the process of establishing a cross-party STEAM commission as a legacy of Essex 2020, which will bring business, local government and the education sector together to tackle the skills shortage in the technical industries. The work described here is instrumental to the success of this, and if this is something that you’re passionate about, then we would encourage you to get involved.

The strategic development group meets monthly, and there will be a time commitment of a few hours (cumulative) between each meeting to undertake research, attend seminars, make exploratory calls etc. You may also need to attend the main CSES Council meeting on occasion (also monthly) and will be involved in preparing and delivering up to four roundtables / conferences each year. We will ramp up to this as the team grows and our network is established.

This is all excellent CPD and will help your career prospects enormously.

If you are interested or would like further information, please contact us.

Community partnerships and network

SUMMARY:

• Want to make a difference to your local community at grassroots level?
• Enjoy working with others and/or looking to make new connections?
• Help us to build a network of similar organisations across Essex to share our resources and give the public wider visibility of events and activities.

Our vision is of a vibrant, collegiate environment in which everyone can learn about and discuss up-to-the-minute topics involving science, engineering and technology. To achieve this, we think it is important to grow our network across Essex and team up with other organisations with similar or complementary aims. We want to act as a hub, providing the platform for third-party activity, helping all involved to access a wider audience and enabling others to work together and with us.

To do this, we need someone (or a small team) who can seek out and maintain those relationships with other organisations, which will range from loose affiliations to formal collaboration partnerships.

Are you passionate about making a difference to your local community at grassroots level? Perhaps your interests go beyond "science and technology" and you would like to see CSES develop its work in culture and creativity – as we know from Essex 2020, we can achieve the most when science and creativity are used together.

This is an excellent opportunity for someone who likes working with community organisations and individuals, rather than larger, more formal entities such as local government and businesses. It is also a great opportunity if you want to make new contacts in the community.

As this is a relatively new way of working for CSES, it will be somewhat open to you to decide how you best want to run this, but responsibilities are likely to include:

• Seeking and approaching potential Collaboration Partners. Proactively making links between collaboration partners, connecting ideas, resources and shared aims.
• Facilitating regular collaboration forum / hub meetings. Attending similar meetings where CSES is represented but not hosting.
• Identifying where CSES could help or join into third-party initiatives, for example by providing volunteers, funding or infrastructure, and assisting in obtaining these, for example by supporting a funding bid.
• Feeding back to the rest of the CSES Council and working with them to provide the agreed support. This includes regular activities such as putting out calls for help and advertising events via the website / email campaigns.

Whether you work in the STEAM sectors or otherwise, this provides excellent personal and professional development and a chance to make new friends.

If you are interested or would like further information, please contact us.

Public engagement and educational events

SUMMARY:

• Enjoy making things happen and running with new ideas?
• Can you, for example, put together events, run projects and workshops, produce videos or come up with innovative ways of engaging online?
• Help us to expand and diversify our programme for schools and for the public to bring science and technology to all.

Our mission is to advance the public understanding of science, engineering and technology. At the grassroots level, this branches into two areas for CSES: Education Outreach (support to the education sector) and Public Engagement (work that directly reaches the wider public).

In both cases, we seek to significantly increase the volume and diversity of work that we do over the coming years. Building on our existing flagship activities such as My Smarter Essex, the Schools' Competition and our lecture programme (in partnership with ARU, the IET, IOP and IMechE), key targets for the next 5 years or so include:

• Increasing our offering for primary schools to match (or beat) what we do for secondary schools.
• Establish partnerships with regional and national education bodies (for example, we have started running CREST-accredited projects and are working more closely with The STEM Hub / STEM Learning).
• Online access to most (if not all) of our activities, including a "go to" digital resources library with material such as webinars, careers videos etc.
• Diversification and expansion of our established lecture series to a sustained programme of interactive conferences, talks, workshops, exhibitions etc that bring the "spotlight" discussions that we are having with our strategic partners to the public.

We need a strong team of people with a variety of skills and backgrounds to make this happen. For example, we need people who can put together events and secure speakers, design and deliver educational projects, produce videos, come up with innovative ways of engaging with people (both in person and online), run workshops for various age groups, mentor teams of students … you get the idea.

We are looking for people who can bring fresh ideas to the table and make them happen, and who can lead on various aspects of the work. If you enjoy making things happen, the thrill of live events or media production, working with schools and young people or indeed organising community activities for a wider audience, then this is a great opportunity for you.

We need people who are (a) available to help on an event-by-event or activity-by-activity basis and (b) happy with a more regular commitment to coordination and planning, or both.

There are significant opportunities here across the spectrum of science and creativity, and we welcome people from any background to help us build a rich and diverse team. If you do work in the STEM, education or creative sectors, then the professional development benefits are huge.

If you are interested or would like further information, please contact us.