My misguided youth

However, the more I learnt about the market, the more I questioned why I hadn't realised the opportunity of having an interest, hobby, passion, career or (dare I say it) life in technology at an earlier age.

How come I didn't know anything about the whole area I am now making a living in!?!? 

I'd never heard of PHP, the Perl I knew was the one you'd find in an oyster (if you were outrageously lucky), SOAP was what I was meant to wash my hands with and my teachers would tell you that my head was in the Cloud at the best of times as I gazed out the "Windows" in class...

You could call me ignorant, but as a "Gen Y" kid I always made good use of technology as part of the first real child generation that showed the possibilities of what was achievable with the evolution of opposable thumbs and a fair bit of hard work... on the Sega Megadrive (or whatever 2nd rate console you had at your disposal). 

The point I'm trying to make is that I was aware of Technology, I used it every day, furthermore I got a lot of enjoyment out of it, so why hadn't I ever tried to understand it and how it worked?

As with any issue that involves the younger generations a lot of the 'problem' lies with those that lead them (i.e. Parents, Teachers etc.). In fact I think it lies almost completely with them.

The way I see it from my personal experiences is that many of those who are so fascinated in technology and what it can enable us to accomplish go out of their way to independently educate themselves when they were younger (whether they realised they were learning or not), are the ones who are now working in the area. I could have had the opportunity to do this in a structured environment when I chose ICT as a GCSE. 

However, all I learnt about was a load of boring nonsense about the Agave Americana, a South American ornamental plant that the projects in this course were based on, and how to make a nice and pretty Power Point Presentation, draw diagrams and annotate them etc. 

These are skills that shouldn't be sniffed at, we all know you can achieve a lot through an impressive presentation, but learning about how the desktop applications I was using were built and how they worked would have been a lot more interesting and, most importantly, may have paved the way for me to develop my understanding into how websites and other various computer software was built... I may have even experimented with some of my own code! You could just as easily say that I wouldn't have wanted to know more, but at least I would have had more of an opportunity to find out. 

To help convey my standing a colleague of mine James, who did Computer Science at University (and wrote a blog a couple of weeks ago called "Post-graduation prospects" shared with me his story. 

From an early age claimed he was intrigued by technology at home and school. He always made an attempt to fix broken computers/printers and explored the internet (not just what he could do with it, but how it worked) at Primary school.This passion developed and helped him make the decision to do Computer Science when he was 15. So James, due to his own initiative and personal passion in how things worked, and this being identified and encouraged by Teachers and Parents alike, led him down that path. Not everyone is going be able to do this on their own. Many, like me, may not even play around with the concept in their heads. 

So the root of my issue is that I was never inspired to understand how technology worked and how it enabled me to do things I got some amount of pleasure out of. 

This is surely the responsibility of the powers that be, to initiate these discoveries for young people, especially today as technology determines, organises and enables most of our professional, social and even personal lives! After much deliberation in my own mind about this subject at various points over the last couple of years since I have been working at Mortimer Spinks, I am pleased to say that the problem, and the solution, has already been identified and published in the Media with movements like the Guardian's Digital Literacy Campaign. 

The dysfunctional approach that schools have been criticised for taking over the years is evolving. 

The Next Gen Skills Campaign, Chaired by Ian Livingstone, has been attacking the issues head on by ultimately trying to include better Computer Science teaching for children by incorporating coding and programming as part of the National Curriculum. In my opinion this is just the antidote required to inspire young people to want to learn about the things that now affect every facet of our day-to-day lives and, most importantly, how they work, so their own ideas can begin to flourish to improve the technologies we have today. 

The success of such a campaign could altogether eradicate the boring notion of "ICT" that I had in my younger days and make understanding how the latest technologies work more mainstream, even cool! This then has the by-effect of overcoming the obstacle that having a real passion for technology is "geeky" too, another variable factorstunting the growth of the Digitally Literate youth identified by Professor Dame Wendy Hall (this was also said to prevent more girls/women pursuing a future in technology, but that is a discussion we can save for another time). 

From a business, economic and growth perspective, the accelerated development of technology over the last 2 decades means we are in a position where the professional world needs more armed Technology "Ninjas" than ever before, whether the business sits in the technology arena directly or technology is an enabler of the business. 

So taking action in this discussion can only be of benefit to them too in the short term... Supplying the demand...Take it a final step further and it's plain to realise that if we are to continue to progress the advancements made in recent times at anything like the same rate then there will already be an increased demand for skills since I started writing this blog... 

These changes need to be made sooner rather than later.