Winner of ICT Woman of the Year announced

MEDIA RELEASE

9 August 2013

Winner of ICT Woman of the Year announced: Says We Should Be Teaching Our Kids To Code

Queensland business woman Yvette Adams was honoured last night at the prestigious national 2013 iAwards held in Melbourne when she was announced as the National ICT Woman of the Year.

The iAwards is Australia’s premier technology awards program - which recognises the contributions that ICT make across all facets of both the Australian and global economies.  The 2013 iAwards program showcases the many ways in which ICT adds value and drives productivity and innovation in Australia.

The ICT Woman of the Year is awarded to an inspiring ICT woman who has made consistently distinguished contribution to the ICT industry. The ICT industry is Australia is under represented by women, with the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing there were some 131,059 women employed in the ICT industry, or just over 24 per cent of the total workforce.

Despite the disproportionately low numbers of women in ICT, their contribution is huge and many inspiring women are CEOs and leaders in their respective fields of endeavour and make a consistently distinguished contribution to the ICT industry, with this contribution widely recognised for its excellence and commitment.

Kids Should be Taught Code

Yvette Adams is a serial entrepreneur having started 5 businesses and having sold two as well as being a proud mother of two (aged 9 and 6).
Adams believes entrepreneurialism should be encouraged in schools and that code is the language of the future, and should be taught in preference to subjects such as algebra and calculus.

“There is already a massive skills shortage globally when it comes to developers/programmers and it is only going to get worse. If you want to encourage your child into a profession that they are guaranteed to get well paid work in, head them into technology! It is also the industry that will move Australia forward post the mining boom, so we might as well start them early.”

In May she returned from a jam-packed fortnight in Silicon Valley where she visited 11 companies, including Facebook, LinkedIn, IBM and EventBrite and saw first hand the insatiable demand for what the Americans call program engineers, but which Australians refer to as developers or coders.

Through her company The Creative Collective, Adams is also focused on assisting business professionals who are struggling to find work or run a business in the digital age to get up to speed with new technologies and has assisted thousands of people through a range of services and training programs.

“There is no point in fighting technology or ignoring it. It’s not going away, and the sooner you embrace it, the better off you, your business, and your family will be,” she says.

Kids know more about us than technology

Adams also says for the first time in history, our kids know more than something about us: technology and is concerned that more parents aren’t skilling up on technology so they can support their children.

She is currently writing a book called ‘NO KIDDING: Why our kids know more about technology than us and what we can do about it’ which she plans to publish later this year which will assist people with this issue.

“Today's kids are intuitively able to use every device, app, game and social network handed to them. Just give a tablet or a smart phone to a toddler and watch what happens. But as life speeds up, and we’re busy than ever being ‘good parents’, the technological gap between generations seems to grow exponentially. We expect the education system and the Government to do something about it, but the fact is kids desperately need their parents to understand the technology they are using RIGHT NOW, and to embrace the technology themselves.”

ENDS

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