Where can studying geography take our students?

25 February 2025

Read time: 5mins

‘Sir, why do I need to learn this stuff? I’m not taking geography after school.’

Brilliant. After trying to highlight the benefits of studying geography, discussing the importance of the subject in helping our students better understand the world that they live in and the complexities and interdependencies that exist I still get this response from my less engaged students.

So I’m now asking myself whether I’ve done a good enough job at promoting the benefits of studying geography beyond the classroom, and while I discuss the importance of the subject from time to time and while I’d like to think what I’m teaching the students is important, some of them are still not connecting the dots to the opportunities that may lie ahead of them through studying geography, or recognising the valuable transferable soft skills that the subject offers.

And why would they, or how could they if I’m not explicit enough about the opportunities. And there lies my first hurdle, what do I know about careers linked to the study of GSCE geography? After all, I’ve simply had a handful of part-time service jobs, delivered furniture (although I did have a navigation role here before Sat Navs became a thing), and then gone onto university and straight into the classroom after that. A similar story to many I imagine.

My experience of all things geography careers is somewhat lacking. Therefore, if I am to educate my students about the myriad of futures that lie ahead of them, I need to upskill my own knowledge.

Now I’ve already got displays on the corridors, thanks to Tutor2u’s free downloadable resources, but other than that I wasn’t really promoting anything else. After time such displays simply become wallpaper and unnoticed. There was no real detailed thinking behind my teaching of careers in geography, or of pathways beyond school. I was simply teaching the content they were to be assessed on.

I now have a new role as my school’s careers lead and while I’m still adapting and learning in this role it’s made me recognise the importance of delivering careers from within my subject area and how effective delivery can empower, inspire and motivate students.

So what can we do to make the delivery of careers and pathways more effective?

Assess the current situation – What does careers education, information and advice currently look like in your curriculum? Here is a link to a subject audit sheet. Use it to help assess your strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.
Research the career opportunities and career pathways – Spend some CPD time exploring careers together. When discussing specific jobs with students, discuss the different pathways to get into such professions, e.g. as well as traditional A level routes, discuss potential T levels or apprenticeship options. Did you know there are 700 different types of apprenticeships on offer? I didn’t until we recently had an external speaker in our school.
Map specific careers to units of work – Think about where in your curriculum you could discuss specific careers. E.g. when discussing urbanisation and the issues linked to growth – town planners, digital mapping. When discussing the energy mix of the UK – the growing jobs linked to green industries such as renewables. My tip here is to avoid overloading your schemes of work. You don’t need to shoehorn a career into every lesson. You may simply decide to touch on one each term for each year. This could be delivered in lessons or you may set a home learning activity to research jobs linked to given schemes of learning. But imagine, even if you conscientiously discussed three careers each year that would be 15 purposeful discussions.
Engage with employers – Discuss jobs within their profession and the pathways of their employees / colleagues. It is often surprising to learn about the vast roles within each organisation beyond the most obvious. For example, when studying coastal erosion can you find someone that works in coastal management? My tip here is to make use of your careers team (if you are lucky enough to have one).
Making the most of your careers team – In my school we have a full time employability mentor that supports the coordination of employer engagements by working with your local Enterprise Coordinator (EC) that is ultimately someone who works with a number of schools to support the delivery of careers. Schools should also have an Enterprise Advisor (EA), which is a local employer that helps schools to provide more career advice and information. Our EA just so happens to work for an offshore renewables company that specialises in research and innovations within the industry. We made the most of this link and arranged for the EA to do an assembly to all students about the wind industry in the region, in addition they also brought along someone from a wind energy operator. They provided a great presentation, covering the potential growth of the wind sector and discussed the benefits of studying subjects such as geography.
Arrange workplace visits – It’s not always possible to take students to visit some employers, but there are opportunities for teachers to visit. Speak with your careers lead about employer engagement events, your local EC will be able to support you here. Companies run these throughout the year for teachers, providing opportunities to develop our knowledge of more job opportunities linked to our subject.
Career Champions – Dependent on the size of your teams you may be able to assign one person to take the lead role on careers within your subject. This would involve working alongside other subject career champions and sharing best practice within your school, basically another sub-teaching and learning group in which you would meet once a half-term to share ideas alongside your whole school careers lead. Structures like this will also help your school to be more strategic about their career coverage and help departments support each other when given careers have ties to multiple subjects. For example, geography compliments STEM subjects well.
Highlight the employability skills within your curriculum and therefore the transferable skills that geography helps develop – As well as mapping out potential careers that you cover across the key stages, think about how you could highlight specific skills within your curriculum. You can find resources on these soft skills and how to implement them through Barclays Lifeskills or another one to explore would be Skills Builder. This may help students to understand not simply the knowledge we deliver but also the skills. The Careers and Enterprise Company also have this useful auditing planning sheet.

I have no doubt that there’s lots more good practice out there that will support us to deliver careers more effectively within geography, but hopefully these ideas will support you in your next steps towards better preparing our students for the jobs of tomorrow and to support them to become the future leaders we want and need to build the sustainable world we all aspire it to be.

It is National Careers Week on 3-8 March 2025. Take a look at the GA’s Online Teaching Resource celebrating geography careers and suggesting classroom resources to inspire students.