I have been involved in a number of conversations over the last few months regarding the ever-declining number of school and university students embarking upon IT-related careers (in particular, the more technically-oriented roles in R&D and programming etc).
The conversations have been with a wide variety of people including CIO's, university students, high school students, school teachers, parents, IT vendors and entrepreneurs and while the conversations have all been different there is a common thread running through all of them:
Less and less of New Zealand's school and university students are opting for careers in IT
There are many reasons for the current situation including, in no particular order:
- parents not understanding the IT world and therefore steering their kids away from it
- students not being inspired by technology
- our best and brightest can earn a lot more overseas than in NZ
- relevance of the current ICT curriculum being taught in schools
In a way, this is a supply chain problem. We don't have enough kids leaving school wanting to pursue a career in IT. That means we don't have enough people entering university to complete computer science degrees which means we don't have enough graduates and those graduates we do have are highly valued by employers in other countries who are willing to whisk them away from NZ and pay them more than they would earn here. End result: a declining pool of qualified, talented individuals who can help keep the New Zealand technology sector relevant in a 21st century, global marketplace.
Obviously there is no single, silver bullet solution however there are things which will contribute to making a positive difference. For example:
Getting school kids excited about technology-related careers
I recently presented at a Digital Technologies Professional Learning Symposium alongside people from IBM, Datacom, HP, gen-i and Ocular Films. The session we were involved in was a one hour presentation and panel discussion and the audience comprised around 150 Year 12 and Year 13 teachers. The format was that each of the panel members would present for 4 or 5 minutes and then we'd have 15 to 20 minutes for Q&A. I was amazed that all of the presentations were along very similar lines. Each of the presenters, myself included, was very enthusiastic about what they've been able to achieve and experience via their IT-related career and all of us asked the teachers to do whatever they could to show their students the wide variety of career options open to them in IT. Interestingly all of us asked, in our own way, that the teachers help their students to develop 'soft skills' such as innovative thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, conflict management and communication. The similarity between the presentations was striking, all the more so given that each of us had developed our presentations in isolation. Obviously we are all thinking along similar lines though when it comes to the problem at hand and the ways in which it can be addressed.
The reaction from the attendees was amazing. Several came up to me afterwards and said that they hadn't realised what a wide variety of career options were available in the IT sector, a couple asked me (and other panel members) to come to their schools to present to their students and a couple more asked me how they should go about seeking a career in IT.
Key learning: the IT industry needs to do a better job of presenting itself to its potential future employees, managers and leaders
Getting school kids excited about technology
In presentations I have occasionally joked that the difference between digital immigrants and digital natives is that if the former came across a teleporter at a science fair they would be fascinated by the device and spend hours talking to the inventor about how it worked and whether it was safe etc while the latter would simply dial up "New York" or "Paris" and walk through the portal. My three children definitely fall into the category of digital natives. All of them have used PC's from an early age and all of them use them extensively today, sometimes, I must admit, too extensively. (yes Harrison Roberts, gamer extraordinaire, I am talking to you) :-) Two years ago I watched my then 11 year-old daughter playing a multiplayer game on Club Penguin while simultaneously instant messaging one friend/player and talking to another on the phone. When I pointed out to her that there was all sorts of cool technology underpinning her gaming and communication experience the look on her face was similar to what I would have seen if I'd been waxing lyrical about the way in which water comes out of the kitchen tap. Synopsis: my kids don't see the magic of technology and it's not for a lack of trying on my part.
They play games on their PC's, they play games on the Xbox 360, they talk with people over VoIP, they scan images and change them with Microsoft Paint and ArtRage, they use Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Windows Live. They know how to shoot videos with a handycam, edit the results in MovieMaker, add some effects and music and then upload the resulting file to YouTube. So can you imagine the thrill they must experience when they - and tens of thousands of their equally technology-literate peers - head into an ICT class at school to be taught how to create a flat file database ?
The good news is that some schools have found a way to get kids interested in and excited about technology (as well as teaching them to solve problems, work as a team and resolve conflicts etc). They're teaching kids about robotics and the results I've seen personally have been amazing. My eldest son, Harrison, is part of a robotics team at his school (Mt Albert Grammar, famous for churning out people such as Robert Muldoon, Alan Bollard, Arthur Lydiard, Chris Liddell and Brett Roberts :-) ) and I recently had a chance to be a spectator at a robotics competition his team were participating in. There were 8 or 10 teams in attendance and each of them had taken a very different approach to designing a robot to achieve a single pre-defined task (picking up and putting away foam blocks - if they invented one that did the same for Lego pieces I'd have bought one on the spot). It was obvious that a huge amount of work had gone into designing and building each robot and the kids involved were enjoying both the technology and the competition (as were their parents).
A year or so back I also got to talk to some of the people who are involved in the NZ chapter of the FIRST Robotics Championship. Dr Diana Twigden and Bill Smale from Smales Farm Technology Office Park and Professor Ian Maddox from Massey University’s Albany campus have been driving forces behind bringing the competition to New Zealand and in April of this year they, along with 51 others, travelled to Atlanta to observe the worldwide event. You can read more about the championship here but the bottom line is that this sort of technology, competition and engagement is exactly what we need to get kids enthused about careers in technology.
Key learning: getting kids interested in technology is all about making it interesting, relevant and EXCITING
If you're interested in getting your kids involved in robotics there are a number of great resources on the internet including the Microsoft Robotics site, Lego Mindstorms and Vex Robotics.
Getting kids interested in technology is something Microsoft thinks about a lot. While we're obviously looking to the future and how we go about ensuring we can employ talented and well-trained people we also believe that the ability to look at business problems and solve them in a programmatic way is an important skill which we should be helping people develop. To this end a small team at Microsoft Research have been working on a cool project called Boku (named after the little critter in the picture above) which, in addition to letting kids design their own games, teaches them the basics of programming in a way which doesn't require a line of code or a single IF/THEN statement to be written (it doesn't need a keyboard either). Long Zheng has a great video demo of Boku here .
If steps aren't taken to address it, the IT skills shortage has the potential to seriously impact New Zealand's ability to innovate and compete in the technology arena. It's a problem which was years in the making and which will be years in the fixing however the rapidly increasing alignment I see between the IT industry, educators and the government causes me to be very optimistic for the future and that makes me very happy. The other thing that makes me happy is that my kids will soon be sitting in front of the Xbox and 'accidentally' learning to program and that has to be the perfect revenge for a Technology Immigrant Dad :-)