Inspiration with Zenos

Posted by mattpoy on Posted in CompTIA, Education, Learning, People, Talent, Uncategorized Tagged , , , ,

As a young man growing up, I followed many sports stars – Kevin Keegan, Kenny Dalgish, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, but my sporting inspiration was Zinedine Zidane. He was so naturally gifted and so intelligent with the ball. This week, I found inspiration not with footballers, but at youngsters no more than 18 years old who won the apprentice of the year awards at the Zenos annual conference, where I also had the pleasure of presenting my view on the ‘Evolution of IT, Jobs and Learning’.

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.

Youngsters helping the elderly get online

Posted by mattpoy on Posted in People, People Skills Talent, Skills, Technology Tagged , , ,

Back from a short visit to the US, where once again I learned and picked up some cool new things. This one is all about people driving technology.

Read an inspiring article about Steve Jobs, who has left his day-to-day role at Apple. He embodies everything that Apple has created. I particularly liked the quote, “Apple has beautiful artifacts, but what Jobs has been building is a company whose legacy is ideas.”

Another such inspiration is London-born Sean Maloney, who was one of the leaders at Intel and recently suffered a stroke that deprived him of his ability to walk and talk. He has made a great recovery and is now the chairman at Intel China. Success, companies and technologies are always about great people.

A project that impressed me recently was Adopt a Care Home, an initiative that encourages young people from schools and colleges to help the elderly get online. The saddest part of this was that residents of a care home would go downstairs in the morning to collect their post and there wasn’t any. They were used to mail as a form of communciation. This project seeks to do something about that. One great example of its success is Enid Adamson, 87, who hadn’t seen her daughter, who lives in New Zealand, for 2 years. It was terrible that she feared she may never see her again. With the assistance of this project, they now talk once a week on a large screen using Skype, a webcam and clip-on microphone.

Great story. People driving technology to make this a better place.

The routes into IT

Posted by mattpoy on Posted in CompTIA, Education, Skills Tagged , , ,

The problem with IT’s image is not just that the opportunities aren’t well represented, but also that routes in are poorly understood. People assume they need an IT degree, then hear that lots of IT graduates (amongst other graduates) are struggling to find jobs.

I believe the focus on academia is misplaced for IT. IT degrees are good for some but are not the only way. For many organisations, hands on experience gained through IT trainers (eg QA, Just IT, Firebrand, Zenos) and backed by industry certifications count for much more.

CompTIA designs certifications with industry to identify the skills they need. Companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, etc, take much the same approach. Students we speak to who take certifications, such as CompTIA A+ followed by their vendor certification of choice, consistently land rewarding jobs.

When discussing IT careers – in IT lessons, careers advice sessions or the media – we should be clearer about how students can get in, and shift the focus away from IT degrees as the de facto route. This may work to our advantage – as education costs soar, a professional career with a recognised industry certification track may become very attractive.

Furthermore, we’d like to see this real-world focused approach throughout IT education, particularly GCSEs and beyond. We need to teach IT in a practical, exciting way which relates to how it is used in real life, as the aforementioned IT trainers do with great success. This will not only inspire more young people into IT and increase understanding of how to get there, it will also ensure they have the skills to get the jobs they want.

CompTIA has just completed a guide which hopes to help young people understand the many exciting options that a career in IT offers and can be viewed here. This blog post first appeared in Computer Weekly magazine.

ICT education must grow up

Posted by mattpoy on Posted in Education, Learning Tagged ,

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.

Community update

Posted by mattpoy on Posted in Communities, CompTIA, People Tagged , , ,

CompTIA UK hosted our UK Channel Community last Thursday at the ICC in Birmingham and most of us agreed it was the best meeting to date.

A community operates differently. Whilst sometimes tempted to dictate the run of play, it was more productive and more satisfying to see members of the community step up and take the lead at different times during the session, each adding their own nugget of value to the collective. Our chair, IT consultant Richard Tubb, is well respected by all, and his effortless leadership ensured everybody in the room was included, particularly with the ‘30-second Best Practice’ session, now an institution at these meetings. Adam Harris launched the legal resource centre and shared why we localised it for the benefit of our UK members, and vice-chair Lee Evans, owner of Vital Technology Group, updated the delegates on the Quality Mark we are working on.

It was also pleasing to see some new faces take the stage, such Les Billing from HMD Electronics, who led the update on the Vendor Resources Portal and my favourite session of the day, ‘Connecting with Customers’ presented by Gareth Brown, MD of Sytec. Gareth told us that simplicity is the key for customers; that we often talk in our own ‘IT language’ which customers don’t understand, and how great it was to see his company’s mantra – “We Fix IT” – get a great response from the group. This was my biggest take-away from the day: all of us must “de-jargonise” and “de-fluff” our services when we market, and talk to, customers. Great phrases!

The most fulfilling piece of all however, was seeing the members come together, engage in conversation, laugh out loud, talk about the markets, economy and trends, even about their cars, but most importantly build connections and enhance the community.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes the beauty is just to step back from the conversation and watch the magic happen.

IT is the place to be

Posted by mattpoy on Posted in Learning, People, People Skills Talent, Skills Tagged , , ,

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.

It’s down to the people again

Posted by mattpoy on Posted in Customer Service, People, People Skills Talent, Uncategorized Tagged , , ,

I was closely watching the exchange in the US over the debt issues and President Obama supported the Gang of Six plan to reduce trillions of debt over 10 years. In a news debate on TV, the panelists claimed it was led by somebody with whom the President had a close relationship over the years. No surprise.

Now apply this to technology and to every walk of life. Despite the new platforms and tools now at our disposal, doesn’t business still get done when people make a connection with each other and find a situation that benefits both parties? Hasn’t it always been the case, and will it not always be that way? I think so.

I do enjoy the US – such good service and huge choice of everything you care to buy. Little wonder that so much innovation stems from there. It seems to have this knack of combining ideas and people to create some of the most innovative and forward thinking applications of technology.

Look at the image above. In a Brookstone store, I found this cushion; it was a remote control embedded within the softest material. Tacky in some respects, ingenious in others, but it sells! The US has such a willingness to try things, to embrace failure as a step in the right direction; as one leading author claimed, “By failing in a project or task, that is one less mistake that can’t happen next time.”

I enjoyed being a part of the Service 800 event where the theme was excelling in customer service. I had a chance to present to the group and engaged in some interesting conversations with individuals from 3M, GE Healthcare, Lexmark, Siemens and others, as well as some quite brilliant personalities from CompuCom. Some of these great people were kind enough to share a testimonial for me (see the tab above). Europe can benefit so much by watching and learning from these service experts.

A Wii in the classroom

Posted by mattpoy on Posted in Education, Future of Technology, Learning Tagged , , ,

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.

Everyone should be a part of IT

Posted by mattpoy on Posted in CompTIA, Education, Events, Future of Technology, Skills, Technology Tagged , , , ,

Carlota Perez, leading economist at Cambridge University and an expert in global techno-economic paradigm shifts, explains that every 70 years, a disruptive technology emerges that alters the foundations of the economy. The 5 ages of transformation to date include the industrial revolution; the age of steam and railways; the age of steel, electricity and heavy engineering; the age of oil, cars and mass production; and the age of information and telecommunications.

It interests me to see the technology changing so much and so fast. Will technology ever reach a settling point or just continue to evolve ad infinitum; it cannot be too long before it becomes a utility much like electricity and gas, and I can see just one global and seamless wireless network where every device we purchase is connected.

Technology has been a catalyst for taking away precious time – by being better connected we are working longer hours. On the train to London this week I counted as many people on their smart devices as those reading or sleeping and you can just see the frustration as we travelled through a tunnel and they lost connectivity! I look forward to when my fridge has sensors and RFID chips embedded in its doors that recognise when I am out of bread and milk and can order it on my behalf, when my camera (or phone) automatically uploads my photos to my piece of the Cloud immediately as I am taking them and my casserole tells me which ingredients go next into the pan – all so I can get back some of the previous time that technology has taken away in the first place!

So where has the week raced away to exactly? It included a long trip to South Africa for the CompTIA member conference in Johannesburg, a great networking and education event for the leading IT vendors and training companies, and then swiftly back again to host meetings with some of our largest partnerships in Europe: Zenos, the UK’s leading IT apprenticeship provider, the Oxford and Cambridge examinations board (OCR) and Intel. Intel are diversifying into some cool new areas, look forward to seeing more of that. Is there a connection between the people I met this week, regardless of location and business focus – there clearly is. Each party is looking for ways to improve the skills of their staff, customers and partners to differentiate them in the workplace. Technology appears to be accelerating change, and yet we don’t have the skills we need to even keep pace with the demands. There is a common recognition that unless we have the skilled people in place to manage and develop this technology, and to put it to effective use, we may not get the best out of it from all quarters, and quite possibly never get the time back that so many people crave.

The two fellows in this picture were idling away in the sunshine at the Lion & Rhino Park in Johannesburg earlier this week – not a care in the world as we drove past. I wonder if they heard about Steve Jobs’ announcement of the iCloud! 

Keeping IT cool

Posted by mattpoy on Posted in People, People Skills Talent, Skills, Social Media, Talent, Technology Tagged , , , , ,

Gadgets are the new cool – everyone wants the latest mobile phone, iPad 2, Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy and a myriad of others. In fact, at the recent CRN PartnerConnect conference at the Ricoh Arena, where we talked about cloud business opportunities and mobility, our CEO Todd Thibodeaux brought all of these devices with him in his hand luggage and showed them to the audience, which generated a combination of laughter and interest. Todd also talked about making IT cool (http://blog.comptia.org/2011/05/09/making-it-cool/) and I would like to pick up on this.

When I present to audiences about some of the trends in technology, eyebrows are always raised when I ask about engaging our young employees and utilizing social media for business. Why? The younger generation are digital natives and they live and breath the technology that so fascinates my generation. For them, it is their oxygen, a gateway to the outside world. They also understand how it works, how it connects, and how to maximize it, so why do we push back and in some cases not allow social media sites in the office during work time. My view is that we should encourage its use, and also invite the younger generation to tell us how we can build sites to target the new generation on the platforms they are so comfortable with. That is how we can tie “cool” and “IT” together, and create a new harmony in the workplace. More importantly, by doing this we make our companies a more exciting place to work and we will attract the new generation to want to work for us. Today they have a choice, and those with the skills and talent will decide whether they want to add us to their CV. They are vitally important to our success, regardless of how cool we think our company is – we must engage them on their terms, because they are both our workforce and our customer of tomorrow.

Above was the view at the Ricoh Arena from my room when I drew the curtains in the morning. What a great idea to combine corporate hospitality suites with hotel bedrooms to maximize use of the space. Another cool.