Ni sa bula vinaka kece sara , greetings to ITP members and supporters. It’s Cook Islands language week this week, you can find language guides over on the Ministry for Pacfic People’s website so check them out. This greeting is in Fijian. 

It’s been a busy and diverse work in IT professionals land. I met with Minister Duncan Webb wearing my Standards board hat to discuss the role of standards, some challenges in the standard development system with our user pays model here in Aotearoa, and some specific standards in development or revision. It’s an interesting time to meet Ministers, post budget so no levers they can pull there, and right before they break for election. So my focus with these meetings at the moment is to ask them to instruct their officials to go away and focus their work efforts in a specific direction, while also seeding ideas for parties to consider policy wise. 

I’ve also spent a bit of time on brainstorming across the education system on how we could best leverage Scholarships to achieve inclusion goals. Institutes, businesses, trusts and others offer academic and higher education scholarships, many of these benefactors solely focused on academic achievement. I’ve found they are all blissfully unaware of the diversity challenges of our industry and the opportunities targeted scholarships could provide. More mahi to do on this but I have certainly found a willingness to help and bring visibility and equity to the system. Watch this space for a future update from me as this progresses. 

Last week I attended NZSE’s launch of their Bachelor of Information Management (more on that next week) and was thrilled to see they also announced scholarships for this degree for Women, Māori, Pacific people, as well as those with domestic and international academic achievements. Ka pai NZSE. 

Sticking with higher education the ITP membership has been helping me provide feedback to institutes on the transferable professional skills we as an industry expect learners are taught through their courses. It’s been an interesting discussion and shaping up as transferable skills for all roles and professions, alongside base level skills required to enter a role in digital tech. Remember the cake analogy? this exercise is about defining what ingredients need to go into that digital technology foundational cake. I’m thinking a survey of our readers next week might help harden that thinking up so expect my ask then. 

Bridging the Gap podcast

In this weeks podcast episode I interview Dani on her career as a designer, how she moved from working as a graphic designed in a whiteware company into digital design. Dani's interview is up on YouTube too, we also have Elinor’s interview up on Youtube if you prefer to video form. 

All 5 episodes are on Spotify and Apple. 

Bridging the Gap, because you can’t be what you can’t see

The Great Resignation 

Apparently the Great Resignation is over - well in the UK / USA anyway. Anecdotally this is in line with what I am hearing from employers here as well. The immediate flight post Covid, followed by a bubble of spiralling salary inflation seems to have calmed to some extent. Interestingly this news landed the same week as coverage of an algorithm designed to predict when your staff are planning to move jobs, I know many managers can see the signs but interesting to see how data and insight can achieve the same. 

Blogs this week

Peter’s editorial today is “Building an UpStart Nation, ComCom’s long overdue payments probe” - how to take our startup sector to the next level and the recommendations the Startup Advisors Council have made eg: Remove tax on unrealised ESOP gains (gets my vote), introduce tax incentives for startups and improve our storytelling / sharing of experiences to name a few. Peter wrote on Startups earlier in the week providing an overview of the new Callaghan Innovation programme offering free guidance and counciling for founders. This inspired Brendan’s cartoon this week - Startup Success. 

PS: Peter my advice, use Zoomy, it’s NZ owned and the drivers tell me they earn more per ride, however not many people use it so they are all Zoomy and Uber drivers. 

AI Wrap this week - Deepfakes, Generative AI, and Exciting Advancements - was written by ChatGPT using my collection of links and forming it into an article, saved me about an hour so I’m going to try this with other tools and let you know which ones are easiest to use. 

Our guest blog is - ChatGPT and Threads reflect the challenges of fast tech adoption, their unsustainable growth and decline in users. 

In short 

A few articles that caught my eye this week.

Quantum computing being used to resolve global logistics issues caused during Covid shutdowns, it's great to see Quantum computing moving to mainstream workloads. 

A 3 part series on culture change from local IT consultancy business (and ITP Parnter) Equinox

MPs have been briefed on the possibly “bleak” future awaiting NZ, which Kiwis are concerned about. Here are three scenarios for how it might play out which include concerns about cyber security, mis and dis information. 

Have you seen the new Chorus tool to help figure out how much data you need plan wise for your whānau?  It’s pretty cool.

Digital Technology Te Reo Māori terms

There are on occasion two Te Reo Māori words for an English term. Here are two I’ve posted before: 

Device = pūrere or taputapu

Mobile phone = waea pūkoro or waea kawe

For more terms check out this post. 

Finally - If you are still sticking with Twitter for now (as I am) then here is a hack to change your apps X logo back to the bird. 

Fakaaue Lahi oue tulou - thank you in Niuean. Vic