Follow the guide
The general public’s interest in CERN is growing all the time. You too could help to satisfy its curiosity by becoming a guide.
Would you like to share your passion for your job and for science with others, meet visitors and contribute to the Laboratory’s communication drive? Well you can, by becoming an official CERN guide.
Every year CERN organises over 900 visits, welcoming some 26,000 visitors in the Laboratory’s four most commonly used languages: English, French, German and Italian. For the last two years, in response to demand, visits have also been given in other languages, such as Finnish, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.
Becoming a guide can be an exciting experience, offering the opportunity to get out and meet visitors of all ages and nationalities. "As well as coming into contact with all kinds of people, you get to know the Laboratory extremely well", says Dominique Bertola, who is in charge of the Visits Service.
In addition to giving tours of the Laboratory, the role of the guide is to welcome the public, spark its interest and answer questions. The goal is to tell as many people as possible about the Laboratory’s missions and values and to arouse their curiosity about science. Visits therefore play an important role in public outreach and help to give the general public a better idea of the aims and spin-offs of CERN’s research. This means that the guides play a vital role in helping to promote the Organization’s image.
The Visits Service offers guides a training programme comprising an introduction to the visit itineraries, as well as communication courses which can be very useful for working life in general. Guides are also remunerated. The Service has just updated its "Guides Newsletter", just one of the many sources of help and information available to the guides. The newsletter, which is now more attractive and full of practical information, is sent out by e-mail every fortnight.
If you would like to devote some of your time to showing others around the Laboratory while at the same time enjoying the advantages available to the guides, you can find out more about it and sign up by sending an e-mail to:
Future visit activities
Visits to the underground experiments will no longer be possible when the new LHC accelerator begins operation. All visits will take place above ground, but the huge size of the CERN site offers plenty of scope for new thematic itineraries focussing on specific aspects of the Laboratory, which are currently being drawn up. With this in mind, CERN is refocusing its outreach activities around the Globe of Science and Innovation. The aim is for the Globe to become the focal point for discovering the Laboratory, hosting film projections, lectures, exhibitions and debates as well as acting as the starting point for visits.
