Other things are clearer, such as the matter of jobs and learning. The world of work continues to change and jobs for life are extinct. We have to reorganise ourselves to be ready for portfolio work, increased life expectancy and an ageing population. Interest in entrepreneurship is on the rise, lifestyle businesses more popular and technology and social media combine to flatten the world. In IT, job roles are moving up the value chain as IT moves closer to the customer and therefore the revenue line. It is possible that most of the future IT jobs will be outsourced to IT providers and most of the employment will come from these supplier/partner companies.

The CIO of Johnson and Johnson was recently quoted as saying, “I believe the idea of hiring people for a job is well past.” My view is that IT is at the head of this particular table, with the future being more about job rotation programmes and flexible career paths, combining technical skills with the business-savvy.

It will be down to each of us as individuals to keep our skills refreshed and up to date, down to our ‘Learnability’, how fast we can forget the old and learn the new as we transition from project to project, department to department and company to company.

I have taken this quiet Christmas holiday period to read lots of interesting material, from Alan Sugar’s ‘Way I See It” to “The First 90 Days” by Michael Watkins and monthly editions of Forbes, Fortune and Wired magazine as well as countless articles and opinion pieces around technology trends, the impact of social media, and skills and talent issues. Next up are Neville Isdell’s book ‘Inside Coca Cola’, describing the making and marketing of Coca Cola from the perspective of his role as Chairman and CEO, and ‘Sense of an Ending’ by Julian Barnes.

I can’t get enough of things to read, and my new role at Pearson allows me train journeys to digest lots of new material. I read recently that one successful individual recommends 3 things everyone should read – and I agree 100%:

1) Biographies of successful people; 2) Something to do with a thought, such as Michael Porter on competitive advantage or Peter Drucker on management; 3) Books that inspire you to go beyond yourself.

With the year having raced to an end, I believe we can claim to be a little bit wiser than we were 12 months ago, and this quote by Victor Hugo sets the stage for the new year best of all: “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”

A Happy and Healthy New Year to all.

Zenos is a quite amazing company. 400 staff, mostly young and very dynamic, but what really stands out is the camaraderie, the culture and the ethos that drives this team of people led by Jason Moss and his management team. They live to help the next generation acquire the skills that will set them on the road to a new chapter in their lives, a career IT.

I selected Ashleigh Carr as the Zenos-CompTIA apprentice of the year.  He is 18 years-old. He has Crohn’s disease. Our CompTIA A+ certification helped him find himself and a job at the Royal Bank of Scotland in IT Support. Most of 400+ audience were in tears as I presented the award to him (and we gave Ashleigh a 3D LED TV as a cool gift to go along with his award). We must never forget, this is why we exist, helping Ashleigh and others like him to get a job and make progress in the world of technology.

I will always love football, basketball and most other sports, and I will always enjoy watching the best talent grace our stadia. But this week has taught me that our inspiration comes from these youngsters, who overcome adversity to achieve results and aim high, and get the jobs they apply for. If that is our future, there is hope. Presenting at Zenos this week, and handing out this award, was my finest hour at CompTIA. Thank you Jason, Claire, Nicky, Richard and all the fantastic Zenos team.

It’s all very well talking about how IT is an exciting career, but unless we start telling people about it, we’re not going to attract the people we need.

This all starts with education. Too many secondary schools have an IT curriculum which teaches Word and Excel and other subjects pupils already know about. This is boring.

We don’t teach 14 year old English students how to read, we teach an understanding of literature and use it to cultivate analytical, evaluation and communication skills. Similarly, IT should give students an understanding of how technology works and the tools to use it in productive and creative ways. It should teach subjects which, for those who enjoy IT, can be developed into relevant career skills.

Once students are excited about IT, we need to ensure that when they look for advice – from careers advisors, parents or teachers – these people have the materials to explain what IT can offer. The IT industry can help by providing these materials. CompTIA, for example has just completed a guide for use by such people to explain careers in IT and how we can help. Those interested can download the guide, called Be Part of the Future, from www.comptia.org/uk.

We also need people who will fly the flag in the media. Perhaps we could even find a champion who can do for IT what James Dyson did for engineering. An even better result would be for IT professionals to volunteer to visit their local schools or college and tell students why they love their career.

It’s a big job, but as an industry we need to find ways to share our love of IT with young people. As appeared in Computer Weekly magazine.

Pupils across the UK have received their A-level results and are wondering what to do next. Like every year, we can expect that nowhere near enough of these talented individuals will pursue a career in IT.

The reason for this is surely not that IT has little to offer, or that it is too specialist, or even that it is boring, for it is none of these things. But this is how a lot of young people see it. Until we start doing something to change this perception, we will struggle to attract the required talent.

IT flies our planes, broadcasts our football matches, and records and edits our music. IT systems monitor the effects of global warming, fight terrorism, and ensure hospitals function. New innovations like the iPad and Facebook have made billions and changed the world.

None of these are dull professions and they are all areas which interest young people. They are more interesting than most office jobs, and a heck of a lot more interesting than bar work, which seems to be the fate of all too many talented young people.

But as an industry, we are seen by many 16-18 year olds as sitting in a basement with a computer. We need to change this perception and get these people, who are currently making big career decisions, excited about IT. We need to start focusing on all the exciting and varied opportunities that IT offers, and to communicate this to young people through education, careers talks and the media.

Now some may interpret the headline as nerves getting the better of a kid on his first day at school! But this is something entirely different.

The Financial Times was recently quoted as saying more than 86m units of the Wii have been shipped, so why aren’t we using these consoles in the classroom? The president of Nintendo is keen for the new Wii U “to fundamentally change the structure of entertainment.” Pictured to the right, the Wii U controller has a touchscreen as well as the traditional controls which can create different interactions between players. Its ability to help retain focus is another interesting point.

Because kids are seen to have a multitude of applications on the go at once – Messenger, music/radio, Facebook, school homework and more – we think they can’t focus. Nonsense I say. These kids have a laser focus, just not with the boring stuff their schools feed them. I think the time has come to fully integrate these consoles into the learning process and just watch the results. The University of Wolverhampton in the Midlands of the UK has been doing this for a couple of years with tremendous outcomes of inclusion and benefits to all parties.

Which brings me on to another timely area of debate, and that is graduation time. With so many students happy and hopeful their studies are over and looking forward to the wide world of work, have we prepared them well? Students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills and then cast out into a different world requiring a totally different skill set, left alone of course to work this out for themselves! Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and purse their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live it, but as we know, very few people at graduate age can take an inward journey and instead need to encounter the experience to truly define the path they ultimately take – and these days, it isn’t just one path, but a series of very different walkways and careers on the way to wisdom.

Did I really plan a career in the IT arena with a ‘major’ in certification – no chance. Do I love the experience today, no question. Some call it the cart before the horse.

As somebody who commutes to London often, and travels overseas occasionally, I am surprised to read about Brain Shot by Random House publishers. This is a product that distills regular books into a 10,000-word, 60-page e-book for people in a rush, on the go and no time to read. For example, John Barrow’s “100 essential things” has been reduced from a 340-page book by 80%. Part of the beauty of books is to learn, get-away-from-it-all and lose yourself in the pages. Is that excused because it has been given the ‘technology effect?’