Welcome to this weeks 920 weekly roundup! The days are getting longer, we’ve seen some sun recently and this years football world cup has come to an end . . .
As I said the other week, we have a team of die-hard football fans in both our Auckland and Wellington offices. And while no one is a dedicated German fan, we did have a sweepstake going and the lovely (and very English) Jane in our Auckland office was seen at the pub on Monday morning looking very happy! Auckland also had a sweepstake for their contractors and they want to say a huge congratulations to Carolyn who managed to win herself a dinner at the Brazilian Wildfire restaurant! Holly, Meher and Rajender were also the lucky runner up winners of some Gold Class movie tickets.
Being an IT recruitment agency we are all very passionate about the future of IT, especially here in New Zealand. In order for the sector to grow we need more and more people with the required skills but what is the best way for this to happen? Liam Dunn wrote an interesting opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald called ‘Let’s teach all our kids to code’. He states that “we churn out highly literate citizens, now it is time to churn out computer-literate ones”. We also need to focus on getting more females into the IT sector: “In the middle of the 1980s, 37 per cent of computer science majors were women. As of 2012, that number was more like 18 per cent.” So, how do we get girls to code?
This week we were also talking about the digitization of banks in our consumer savvy culture and why banks have been much slower on the digital uptake compared to airlines and shopping retailers. We have to admit that New Zealand banks have been ahead of the times but wouldn’t it make it easier if everything could be done online?! And then in typical perfect timing, we saw this article about Bank of America illegally copying software.
And for some light Friday afternoon entertainment . . . Don’t tell these guys it’s just a game!
Have a great weekend!
From the Ninetwenty Team
