Exploration Radio

On December 23rd, 1935, Walt Disney sent a memo to Don Graham, an art teacher, asking for his help in running some courses for his employees at the Disney Studios. Walt felt that people being hired at his studio were adequate cartoonists - they knew how to draw really well. But they were missing the key elements of being a good animator - the ability to capture motion and movement in their drawings and use those to impart emotion and a sense of storytelling to the audience. Since there were no schools or institutes teaching this skills, he took it upon himself to fund these courses. The early success of Disney Studios was driven by this investment in up-skilling and educating their staff. They pioneered teaching the skills required to be an animator - along with developing better filming techniques and equipment to produce better animation films. For over 80 years, Disney Studios have run these courses largely uninterrupted. In that time, they did not only end up training their own employees to be better animators, they ended up training animators for the entire industry.

With the current movement of changing skillsets in geoscience, we could be standing on the same precipice as a 1920s cartoonist - needing to acquire new skills to stay relevant in a changing industry. The question of who should be responsible for up-skilling geoscientists is not an easy one to answer. Most companies have scrapped graduate programs, which used to teach the key practical skills required for survival in the industry. Universities are more interested in teaching the fundamental scientific skills and not the industry specific practical skills anymore. With the ever increasing digitalisation in geoscience, the skills gap between what is being taught and what will be required is only getting wider.

Our guest today is Richard Lilly, who runs NEXUS, the National Exploration Undercover School - a 3-week program built around teaching undergraduate geoscience students the practical skills they will need to succeed in a career in the resources industry. Initiatives like NExUS are trying to bridge the gap by teaching students the fundamental practical skills from the past but, more importantly giving them a broad understanding of the skills that may be relevant in the future. Like how Walt and Disney worked on fixing the skills gap in cartoonists becoming animators, Richard and his team are working on the skills gap between what geoscientists know now and what they might need to know in the future.