The Armed Forces as a Career Path Kicked Off

Good Start for Exploring Careers in Defence and Preparedness

On September 9th, the project Exploring Careers in Defence and Preparedness was kicked off with a joint startup workshop. Here, 40 representatives from youth and vocational education, higher education as well as the Armed Forces and Emergency Services met to receive a common introduction to the project – and not least to begin work on the concrete collaborations.

The project, which is funded by the Region of Southern Denmark, aims to strengthen young people's skills and knowledge of educational and career opportunities in the Armed Forces, Emergency Services, and related professional fields. At the same time, the project aims to create more practice-oriented teaching by linking students' academic skills to real-world problems, environments, and tasks. During the project period, around 1,560 students from HHX, HTX, EUD, and FGU are expected to participate in the project's activities.

A World with Increasing Need for New Competencies

Security policy senior advisor Lars Bangert Struwe opened the workshop with a presentation on the geopolitical background of the project. He focused on a world characterized by greater uncertainty, technological development, and increasing demands on both the Armed Forces and the civilian emergency services.

A key point was that the future defense and emergency services will require far more professional skills than the traditionally military ones. There is, among other things, a need for competencies in IT and cybersecurity, logistics, mechanics, electricity, technology, communication, and management. This provides a number of obvious connections to the educations and subjects represented in the project.

Inspiration from an Existing Defense Line

The participants also received concrete experiences from Heidi Nellemose Rosenlund from Baltorp Business Gymnasium/NEXT, who has been involved in developing a high school defense line.

Here, the defense perspective has been integrated into English, history, marketing, and business economics through cases, guest lecturers, visits, and collaboration with the Armed Forces. The experience is that the connection works best when it is based on the subjects' own goals and only used where it makes real academic sense. Another important experience is the need for clear contact persons between educational institutions and collaboration partners.

From Ideas to the First Agreements

An important purpose of the workshop was to bring the project's many actors closer together. Prior to the day, participants were asked to consider where they could see concrete collaboration opportunities.

This was noticeable during the day. Participants came with well-developed ideas related to cybersecurity, logistics and supply, technology, emergency services, business economics, management, and career learning. Several left the workshop with new contacts and the first concrete agreements on further dialogue and activities.

Now the actual development work begins. Project partners must translate the opportunities into concrete teaching courses, visits, cases, and other activities, and the project management will continuously follow up and support collaboration across sectors.

The startup workshop showed that there are both ideas, expertise, and a strong willingness to collaborate. The next step is to translate this into activities that young people can encounter in teaching.