When S Club 7 were still young enough to be allowed on bouncy castles, they sang a song about reaching for the stars.
For a fresh generation of pop-loving school leavers it was the perfect ditty to motivate all of their aspirations for achieving a truly stellar career.
Well, it turns out reaching for the stars is something we’re actually very good at in Scotland.
An estimated 18 per cent of all Britain’s space industry jobs are now located here and for the past two years Glasgow has been building more satellites than any other city in Europe.
The latest satellite to be assembled in the UK has just been launched from Russia and its mission will be to monitor air quality around Planet Earth.
Sentinel-5P will make an extraordinary 20 million observations daily, creating detailed maps of polluting gases and particles that are recognised as being potentially harmful to human health.
The spacecraft, which is our contribution to the EU’s Copernicus Earth-monitoring programme, would not have been possible without the input of all the IT professionals who created the hardware and coding to make Sentinel-5P fly and function.
The fact is IT pros – from software developers and engineers to IT support assistants and scrum masters – are constantly harnessing the power of new technology in pioneering ways . . . and very often for the future wellbeing of our entire planet.
Perhaps the most important development has been the increased sustainability of resources brought about by the rise of digital storage.
When the first MP3 units began to replace CD players, who could have foreseen that this would one day lead to a worldwide reduction in the number of CDs being manufactured and shipped, at great carbon cost, around the planet?
There are many more examples of how new technology no longer threatens Earth in the way many of the Industrial Revolution’s machinery and factories did but, on the contrary, is helping to save it.
Computer scientists are growing more accurate at building climate modelling software, while developers who can write more efficient code – with far fewer active cycles – are helping to save energy.
By pulling together many different areas of such IT expertise, just imagine what we could achieve for the environment and the way we live.
If you’re up for that challenge, why not take a look at the latest roles in IT & Telecommunications on s1jobs?