The brief:
The Education State initiative by Victoria’s Andrews government aims to build an education system that produces excellence and reduces the impact of disadvantage. Working over several months, both in house and remotely, with The Department of Education and Training, APM wrote around 40 fact sheets and range of press releases, brochures, web sites, FAQs and other collateral for launch of this initiative.
Copy sample:
The brave new world of work skills
Globalisation and the emergence of low-cost producers in China, India and Indonesia have ensured our economic future no longer lies in making things but in advanced manufacturing and knowledge-based service industries. This shift is going on right now and will require workers with conceptual, analytical and information-processing skills, i.e., STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering Maths). While international benchmarks put Australia/Victoria as a middle-to-upper ranked STEM-skilled workforce (often ahead of the USA and UK), our business community is still struggling to find enough people to fill roles and believes STEM skills should be a priority issue.
STEM at work
In its Skills outlook 2013 report the OECD highlighted how the technological revolution has affected everything from how we ’talk‘ with our family and friends, how we shop, and especially how and where we work. This has shifted the skills that future workers will need strongly towards STEM. They’ll need numeracy and problem-solving skills to grasp complex, abstract information, and to conduct analyses and complex reasoning about quantities and data, statistics and chance, spatial relationships, and change, proportions and formulas.
What is a STEM job?
There’s not a recognised, global set of STEM jobs but health professions, agriculture, environment and related fields, and computing are all typically included, as are accountancy and business studies, economics and econometrics. In fact, of the 85 fields of study available, there are about 50 fields that have a STEM element.