Dr Emma Bolger

It is Seachdain na Gàidhlig - World Gaelic Week 2026! On Wednesday 25th February, I will be sharing publicly for the first time some of the findings from my research on the impact of Gaelic Medium Education on young people’s careers. As the keynote speaker at the Career Development Institute Conference (Scotland), I will be speaking about the career value of Gaelic Medium Education. The keynote will cover: An overview of Gaelic Medium Education Why there is a need for specific research into Gaelic Medium Education and careers A summary of the research project, Gaelic Medium Education: a career advantage for school leavers in Scotland? funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, under the Research Incentive Grant Scheme (Principal Investigator: Dr Emma Bolger, Research Assistant: Ann Morrison) The research findings indicate that Gaelic appears to offer career-long benefits, during education, post-school and into the early stages of adulthood, particularly in enhan...

I was recently invited by Dr Anjali Raj Westwood to appear on the Career Chronicles podcast, discussing maternity leave, returning to work and life as a working mother. I cover policies, pragmatism and the need for a wide variety of options to support working parents.  The podcast is available on Spotify  and on other platforms via Anjali's website .

A post for Scottish Breastfeeding Awareness Week I'm not going to post specific stats here about breastfeeding. This post is simply about how I wanted to breastfeed my children and I have done, against the odds. I grew up in the UK borough with the lowest rates of breastfeeding and having gone for 2 years with my first child and breaking the 1 year mark with my second today I'm in a minority of women who breastfeed their children beyond an initial period of weeks or months.  Two things that have made this possible: 1. My first child weighed, wait for it, 11lb 1oz at birth. He breastfed in the hospital after a traumatic forceps birth. He refused to feed when we got home. He lost 10% of his birth weight. When the midwife (from the team at the then Glasgow Southern General Hospital) came round to check on us we were on the verge of being readmitted. Said midwife cleared their diary for the rest of the day and told me they were staying with me until we got it sorted. ...

Last month, I took my ten month old baby with me to a conference away from home. It's not common to see a baby accompanying a delegate on the academic conference scene and I had quite a few questions and comments whilst at the conference and more since. For those curious as to how it came to happen, here's how (and why) I did it.  " Did you ask if you could bring her?" I had a baby less than a year ago, so she comes with me to a lot of work events. She's been seen regularly throughout this academic year, as I returned to work " early " when she was only 3 months old. For the conference "all" I need to do for explicit practicalities was ask the hosting venue for a travel cot and high chair. There were plenty of other logistical issues to navigate. First of all, I'm not going to suggest bringing your baby with you to a work event is easy or suitable for everyone and every working environment but it has often worked for me and it worke...

A milestone has been significantly, and quietly, passed: it is over 4 months since I came back to work off maternity leave. A milestone because this date means I've been back at work for over half of my baby daughter's short life already. And we have all survived. I'm continually infuriated by the lack of inclusion of mothers who "go back early" from the maternity leave narrative, the lack of focus on the benefits of and barriers to parental leave, the difficulty in finding baby changing facilities in academic institutions and the fact that my daughter is being set up for a lifetime of disappointment once she realises that girls' and women's clothes don't all contain the multiple pockets she's become accustomed to in her baby wear. But I'm also invigorated by how welcome my baby has been at work. We've joked about how she's clocked up more CPD hours than most in our profession since she arrived in June, but it's true. She...

Over the past year, throughout the period of being pregnant with and then having my second child, I’ve discovered that very little career development support exists for new or expectant mothers. Perhaps because it is assumed that we don’t want or need it. I would argue that this period is, in fact, when career information advice and guidance interventions should be considered essential. For starters, the assumption is that we are happy in our work, and that we’ve chosen to have children when work is stable, or that we are riding the storm and plan to use maternity leave as an excuse to get out and never return. But women do want to work, indeed have to, around very small children. While financial considerations might be paramount, they should be equally weighted with mothers’ own emotional needs, which, if career is a lifelong process that incudes periods of education, work and caring, we forget are directly related to her career development. Straw poll time, I know, but I have two...

I am one month into being back at work, and the wee one has turned 4 months old. Given the amount of times friends and colleagues have asked me about my return to work, accompanied by a concerned look, it’s pretty clear that the general understanding of when you go back “early” is that it's not easy and it’s out of the ordinary. A quick definition of “early” is required here: there is a difference between early (in relation to the generally accepted duration of maternity leave) and too soon. I went back when I was ready. The challenge has been breastfeeding around my work. My workplace is ok: I have the option to work flexibly and there is a feeding / expressing room on campus should I need it. I’ve not needed it yet, because I have a private office space and I have a husband on shared parental leave bringing the wee one in to be fed during my breaks and at lunchtime when I am on campus. My daughter, one week after I returned to work, decided she didn’t want to take a bottle ...

December has been a busy month! I have left my job at Skills Development Scotland as a gender equality adviser and have taken up a new post at the University of the West of Scotland, lecturing in careers guidance. Many careers professionals across the UK and beyond will know that my move to UWS marks the end of an era! It’s quite something to step into the shoes of the two well-know, valued and extremely experienced outgoing members of staff, Graham Allan and Janet Moffett. An online message book has been set up for Graham and Janet, which can be found here: http://farewelljandg.123guestbook.com/ Information on the career guidance and devemopment programmes at UWS can be found here . 

I will be presenting a workshop this coming Friday at the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) annual conference , where I will present tools, relevant career counselling techniques, group work and individual exercises that can be used to help students understand why they want to write and where it might take them. I have taught creative writing since 2007 at various universities, in community and adult education, in primary and secondary schools and from undergraduate to postgraduate level. Prior to and during this time I have also worked in careers services, trained as a careers adviser and moved into research and development in the field of career education. I am currently employed by Scotland’s national skills body, Skills Development Scotland , as an equalities expert in the delivery of national training programmes. My interest in career development informs my teaching practice at all ages and levels and I will share with delegates some of the techniq...

I attended the Character Scotland conference  this week, which welcomed over 250 delegates, all keen to explore how we can integrate character development into our educational practices. This is my first exploratory post into character and career education, information, advice and guidance following this two-day conference.  Before I go onto the content of the seminars and keynotes I took most from in relation to my own practice and research, worth noting was the quality of the delivery of presentations. In Seminar 1  Education (re)design , the panel used the PechaKucha approach: presenters work through 20 slides, each displayed for 20 seconds. This was completely new to me, and talk about keeping folk to time and to the point! I am wondering how I can use this in my own teaching and presentations. As a delegate it kept me engaged and whetted my appetite to learn more about the presenters, their backgrounds, their topics. A second stand-out moment in relation t...

This going back to work business is nothing like as easy as it sounds. After you have a child, you don’t just ‘go back to work’ on a set date, at a set time and return to business as usual. Play does not continue as before. At first the novelty of it all and/or the immediate crisis management overshadows your ability to see past how the changes might be affecting you. You may be too guilty about the whole thing to deal with the impact of working plus parenting. By two months in, you are too tired to do anything about it and battle on.  At about the four month stage you realise you can’t really keep the charade up. By six months, something has to or likely already has changed. Oh and socialising with colleagues outside of work, no chance of that. It clashes, with everything.   On returning to work after having a child/children, you spend a fair amount of time desperately trying to establish new routines, finding strategies to prevent you from losing your marbles entirely...

“Read as much and as widely as you can,” is an early piece of general advice given to those starting out on a PhD project. So I have been. Thoroughly enjoyable but I am a person who, once I start reading something I then see something else I’m interested in and I end up having to know all about that in detail before going back to the thing I was originally reading about. I’ve been reading about the future and what it might be like. Wide you say? I’m looking at infinity. My poor brain! Management PhD research (at least, in my topic area) needs to address not only the current situation but to also look at what the problems of the future might be. “Now” moves on to become “then” very quickly in life and before you know it, it’s Friday evening and everyone is wondering why there’s nothing in for dinner. Producing best practice suggestions and practical ideas for positive action in reducing gender and occupational segregation requires an understanding of where we are going and what it’...

UK unemployment: Plan to help over-50s keep working  (BBC News 20 December 2014) I’ve been waiting to comment on this story and press release regarding a new UK government “fundamental reform” (promoted as a jolly, we can mend everything tale from the pre-Christmas bulletins, some might say), setting it aside   from the hyperbole surrounding it and having read through the various responses posted on news outlets. It is so closely related to the trade union funded and freelance work I do and I wanted to scream when I first read what I felt to be a patronising, disengaged and ageist approach (what that the policy purports to stand against). Here is the press release in full: Fundamental reform to fight ageism in the workplace: older workers’ scheme to tackle age discrimination . We are promised a “a world-leading new approach” so hold onto your hats blog-readers, what follows may shock you!  C hange on the way? I regularly work with older adults in emp...