Marina Milosheva

Today marks the start of a full-time internship for Centre for Social Informatics PhD student Marina Milosheva. For a period of 13 weeks, Marina will be working at the Advanced Learning and Skills Analysis Unit within the Scottish Government. This Unit is a part of the Scottish Government’s Learning Directorate. The work undertaken within the Unit focuses on the improvement of the lives of children and young people in Scotland through raising educational standards.

The title of Marina’s internship is ‘Evidence review as part of the evaluation of the Developing young workforce programme (2014-21)’. It is administered through the Scottish Graduate School of Social Scottish Science (SGSSS) internship scheme. 

The overarching aim of Marina’s internship is to gather evidence to evaluate the effectiveness and equity of the Developing the young workforce (DYW) strategy. The main objectives of her work will be to analyse the extent to which the original ambitions of DYW have been achieved, and to understand the ways in which education has changed to meet the programme’s aims and aspirations.

The DYW programme commenced in 2014 following the publication of Education working for all! by the Commission for Developing Scotland’s Young Workforce, chaired by Sir Ian Wood. The report made 39 recommendations aimed at creating a world-class vocational education system in Scotland. The Scottish Government welcomed the report, accepted all of its recommendations, and published the youth employment strategy ‘Developing the Young Workforce’ (2014-21) (DYW) in response. The DYW aimed to take a whole system approach to deliver work-relevant education for young people.

The DYW programme has now concluded, and is currently being evaluated through several externally commissioned studies, as well as the evidence review led by Marina. During her internship, Marina will work with educational partners to bring together relevant published and unpublished analyses to provide an evaluative summary of DYW’s impact on apprenticeships, colleges, broad general education, senior phase education, and employer engagement. This work fits well with Marina‘s on-going doctoral work and research interests on improving young people’s career information literacy.

Marina is the fourth of our PhD students to undertake an internship through the Scottish Graduate School of Social Scottish Science (SGSSS) internship scheme.:

• In 2021 Katherine Stephen investigated the factors that affect career progression in the Scottish fishing industry as part of her internship with Marine Scotland.
• In 2018, Lyndsey Middleton (graduated 2020) worked for the eHealth division of the Scottish Government at St Andrews House, Edinburgh within the Policy and strategy workstream on a project about mobile working technologies.
• In 2017 John Mowbray (graduated 2018) completed a project for Skills Development Scotland (SDS) on the use of social media by young customers of SDS services.