{"id":13067,"date":"2025-05-01T09:32:59","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T07:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trialoog.taltech.ee\/juta-asuja-kuidas-saada-noori-inseneeriasse\/"},"modified":"2025-05-01T10:28:40","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T08:28:40","slug":"juta-asuja-kuidas-saada-noori-inseneeriasse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trialoog.taltech.ee\/en\/juta-asuja-kuidas-saada-noori-inseneeriasse\/","title":{"rendered":"Juta Asuja: How to get young people into engineering?"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Young people don\u2019t choose a career in a vacuum \u2013 they are influenced by teachers, role models, and societal attitudes. To inspire more of them, especially girls, to pursue engineering and ICT, these fields need to be visible and familiar well before the moment of decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":13029,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[249],"tags":[393,497,429,425],"class_list":["post-13067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-education","tag-engineering","tag-haridus-en","tag-inseneeria-en"],"acf":{"postbuilder":[{"acf_fc_layout":"text","type":"text","text":"Young people don\u2019t make career choices in a vacuum. Often, those choices aren\u2019t made consciously at all \u2013 they\u2019re shaped by chance encounters: a teacher who inspired confidence, a friend who offered advice, or a societal image that promised a \u201csecure\u201d future. If we want more young people to choose engineering, we first need to understand what truly influences their decisions.\r\n

What do young people base their choices on?<\/strong><\/h4>\r\n

Among youth, there's a widespread belief that to become an entrepreneur and succeed, one should study business or economics. True, such studies teach how businesses operate and how to manage them\u2013but they often lack the starting point: an idea to build a business around.<\/p>\r\n

Engineering, on the other hand, continuously brings students into contact with real-world problems\u2013whether it\u2019s material sustainability, energy efficiency, smart systems, or technological bottlenecks. These fields teach students to see the world as a system waiting to be improved. Engineering isn\u2019t just a technical discipline\u2013it can also be a practical path to entrepreneurship.<\/p>\r\n

The 2023 Future Shapers<\/em> study<\/a> shows that personal experiences, contacts, and access to information play a major role in young people\u2019s choice of field. Rarely are these decisions made clearly and deliberately\u2013especially when it comes to engineering, which often remains invisible without prior exposure. A survey of high school graduates<\/a> conducted by the Archimedes Foundation points to the same conclusion: people tend to choose fields that are widely discussed in society, that feel familiar and relatable.<\/p>","image":null,"align":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":7306},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","type":"text","text":"

A logical or emotional choice?<\/h4>\r\n

Data from Eurograduate<\/a> \u2013 a European Commission initiative that tracks higher education graduates \u2013 helps shed light on how different motivations influence the choice of study fields. For example:<\/p>\r\n\r\n