km / sitecore

Futureintech: First school visit

I am happy to also be part of Futureintech, a chance for a representative like myself for Datacom in an industry such as ICT, to speak with prospective students - ages range from Primary school (ages 5-13) to Secondary school (13-18) to encourage and inspire them in a career in technology.

My very first school visit was Heretaunga College and I spoke to a small IT class which then got broken down into three more interested students.  It was a great experience sharing my pathway to my current career and talking about what I went through to get here.

I was very impressed with the three students who were aged from about 15 to 17 and was suprised at how much they knew already.  They talked about using PHP, XML, SQL, some web tools such as the developer toolbar in Firefox and showed me a school website project that they were working on. Their teacher was very supportive and pleased with the work they had done and particularly, really proud of how much they had achieved so far.

Futureintech is a great program to reach out to students and bridge the gap between industry and tertiary foundations and encourage students to start thinking about their careers.  Hopefully such school visits as these can influence students to seriously think about their future in technology - hopefully developing/coding software like myself!