Enabling Government Science and Engineering (GSE) leadership

Ensuring scientists and engineers across government are given opportunity and support to become leaders in science and engineering at all stages of their career

This work theme is all about enabling scientists and engineers to show technical leadership at all stages of their career. From discussions with our members, this is a particular area of interest and something we are excited to focus on over the next year!

To develop our strategic aims in this area, we reached out to members to find out what barriers there are for scientists and engineers in feeling like a leader in their area. We found out that when our members think of leaders, it’s not just the chief scientific advisers, but local leaders who help build science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) capability and inspire them to take leadership of their work areas.

Some of our members also said they the GSE profession could play an important role in exploring the different departmental leadership initiatives and leader pathways that exist and communicating these across government. This will help increase access to opportunity and inspire a greater number of members. Another role we want to play is ensuring that STEM specialist colleagues get equal access to central government development schemes and feel confident in applying. We have already started to develop tailored promotion to schemes like the Futures Leaders Scheme for scientists and engineers, but more needs to be done through mentoring and more targeted interventions.