Young people hear plenty about STEM. They hear that it is where the jobs will be, that digital skills are becoming essential and more girls need to enter the field, and that the opportunities are there, waiting.
But is an opportunity easy to imagine when you have never seen the room in which it exists?
When the winning Girls Go Circular team walked through Melita’s premises a few months ago, they were seeing what usually remains hidden behind words such as technology, telecommunications and digital careers; the people doing the work, the environments in which it happens and the many different roles that keep an organisation like Melita moving.
They also saw women already occupying those spaces as professionals contributing and building careers in the field and not merely represented as a statistic about representation.
That small encounter captures what the relationship between JA Malta and Melita has gradually become.
Over several years, the collaboration has moved across programmes and taken different forms; Melita has supported Girls Go Circular, welcomed its winning students into the workplace and more recently, participated in STEMCast as JA Malta works to make STEM industries more visible and relatable to a young audience.
These may appear to be separate activities, while in reality they address different parts of the same problem. JA Malta and Melita both believe that it’s not enough to tell young people that a future exists, because they need the skills to approach it and enough contact with the people already there to believe that it could eventually include them.
That is also where this collaboration became valuable to both entities, as while JA Malta prepares young people to question, explore and participate, Melita brings them closer to the industries and people those conversations are supposed to prepare them for.
Turning STEM from subject into possibility
One front of this collaboration has been Girls Go Circular, a programme designed to strengthen girls’ digital and entrepreneurial skills while encouraging them not to shy away from STEM.
The challenge identified wasn’t simply whether girls can succeed in STEM. We know they can. It’s whether they are given enough opportunities to encounter it early, explore it without intimidation and see people like themselves already contributing to the field.
Melita’s support helped create those opportunities.
Then the collaboration grew beyond supporting programme delivery. The national winning Girls Go Circular team visited Melita’s premises, and the students were able to step beyond the theory of digital skills and into a workplace where those skills are used every day.
They toured the organisation, encountered the working environment and saw women actively building careers and contributing within the sector.
The visit also allowed Melita to engage with the students as young people already testing ideas, learning new skills and considering the choices ahead of them.
Bringing the working world closer
That same principle continues through Melita’s support of STEMCast, JA Malta’s effort to bring STEM fields closer to students and to a wider audience.
For many young people, STEM remains a broad label. It appears in subject choices and policy discussions but it doesn’t always tell them what the work actually looks like, who does it, which skills it requires or where they might fit within it.
STEMCast was designed to make that world less abstract. It creates space for honest conversations about the industries shaping our lives, the people working within them and the different routes young people can take into those fields.
Melita brought something to that conversation that an educational organisation can’t reproduce alone, which is the direct knowledge of a how a dynamic industry such as this one works, the realities of its workplace and the experience of people doing the work now.
JA Malta helps translate that experience for a young audience by asking the questions students may not yet know how to ask and placing industry insight within a learning journey they can understand.
This is where collaboration becomes more than just about visibility and more about impact; Industry opens the door and education helps young people make sense of what lies behind it.
A partnership with something to gain
It’s easy to describe partnerships between businesses and organisations only in terms of what the company gives, but that misses half the story.
Through partnerships like these, organisations gain contact with young people before they become applicants, employees or customers, and gain insight into how students understand the industry, what excites them, where uncertainty remains and what they expect from the workplaces they may enter.
It also gives the organisation’s own people an opportunity to share their knowledge and contribute to the development of Malta’s future talent.
For students, having such organisation in their corner in such manner, brings credibility and proximity. They won’t only hear that skills matter as they see where those skills are put to use.
More than one way to support
The relationship between JA Malta and Melita shows that strong partnerships don’t have to be built around one permanent activity. In fact, their strength lies in their ability to change and adapt.
At one point, the need might have been to equip girls with digital skills and the confidence to explore STEM. While at another, it may become bringing them into a workplace and making those careers visible. Elsewhere, it may be to use conversation and storytelling to make an entire industry more relatable to thousands of young people who have never encountered it from the inside.
What connects these efforts is not a single programme as much as it’s a shared willingness to ask a better question:
What would be genuinely useful now?
When organisations and businesses collaborate in that way, support stops being something delivered from one side to the other and becomes a relationship in which knowledge, access, perspective and opportunity move both ways.
And for a young person trying to imagine where they might belong, that can make the difference between hearing that a future is possible, and being able to see it for themselves.
To learn more about Melita and the opportunities it provides, explore its career opportunities and read more about the company.