An interesting Head of Geography post...

Sadly not one it seems I'm qualified to apply for, but I was interested in the announcement today that a Head of Geography is going to be recruited for the Government Science and Engineering (GSE)

As the site with the announcement says:

The work of government concerns people, communities and environments in specific places, often with strongly differentiated spatial characteristics. Analysing and responding to these patterns requires understanding of how and why economic, social and environmental processes play out differently from place to place, at scales from local to global.
Geography and geographers offer government distinctive benefits. Geography is distinctive for its spatial analytical skills, for its ability to transcend scales, and for its integrating capabilities across multiple disciplines in the natural and social sciences.
Technological advances e.g. the proliferation of locational data – such as that used and generated by mobile devices – has put geography at the heart of ‘big data’, adding to the already valuable toolkit of the discipline.
There is a link made with the Chartered Geographer programme. I've been a Chartered Geographer since 2007, and publicised the programme widely since. A quick search of the database and list shows no civil servants currently, although the list is not necessarily completely up to date, as my biography is an older one. This could be very good news if the profile of the subject is raised. As a member of the Action Plan for Geography team, I enjoyed the latter part of a period when there was some investment in supporting school geography.
I would hope and expect that whoever gets this important role has been supporting geography previously... and shares how they have been doing this. There may well be plenty of geography graduates out there, how have they been supporting geography previously?
Also, the post is on a part-time voluntary basis only...

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