EBizInsider

Normally I recommend and evaluate different hardware or software technologies that can improve your business, but this month I’d like to widen the focus and talk about where we are and where we’re going. As a society, we should be preparing young people to be the computer experts of tomorrow. Are we?

The Present
Bad news – Finding talented designers and programmers isn’t easy. Tinker in HTML or read the latest book on “Photoshop Elements” and people think that they can be a professional web developer. Too often, even college computer science majors aren’t learning the skills needed to program or design for the web’s end-users.

Technology Education
If young people are going to learn about computers, they need the best possible tools and training. Earlier this week I judged a regional web design and programming contest for high school students — for the second year in a row. Twenty teams from different high schools, 100 students, 14 teachers, 5 judges – the event was a big deal for these kids. Some things haven’t changed over the past two years:

• Resources were nowhere near equal between schools. One school used the latest Adobe suite, integrated video in their school’s television studio, and had the school buy a server to run their site. Another school’s programmer designed and programmed the entire site on a shared, public computer using Microsoft Paint and Notepad.

• About one-third of the schools had a specific “Web Design” class, another one-third had only “computer clubs” and the rest had neither.

• There were clear distinctions between those groups who worked as a team or those who had one or two people doing all the work. Teams lost points when they demonstrated
no sense of teamwork or when teams had one person answer all the questions while the others sat with puzzled looks.

• All the finalist/winning teams had self-taught programmers.

Too many schools lack the resources to teach students the skills they need to succeed in a technology-centric economy. In the above contest, even though some schools didn’t provide resources like Photoshop, some teams discovered the free image editing utility GIMP and received extra points for ingenuity.

That’s the good news. These students were eager to learn, and our judging panel was happy to share our resources with them. Some schools will receive prize money and our judges will also record online classes, taking sites apart and putting them together as part of a resource library of free tutorials.

How can you help?
Invest your time speaking at colleges once or twice a semester. As an entrepreneur and an e-business person, you have an advantage over most college professors… you’ve actually been there – done that! You’ll find students who want internships and part-time jobs with your company. Having done this many times, I can tell you it is an extremely rewarding experience. In fact, after last year’s contests, Solid Cactus hired one of the students as a part-time programmer – a Junior in High School!

As you retire old computers, totally wipe them out (for data security) and then restore them to their original out-of-the-box setup using a restore disc. Then donate them to some organization or school that – more often than not – is still running technology slower than the system you’re replacing. I often load on Open Office, AVG Antivirus, and Ad-Aware to give them resources to keep them safe.

The Future
Naturally, Solid Cactus enjoys sponsoring competitions and allowing our staff to serve on these advisory committees or guest lectures. It is great for public relations, but more important, it fulfills our corporate responsibility to prepare the next generation of creative, technology-driven young folks. Hopefully, many will apply to work at Solid Cactus.

That’s the point. You’re not only donating your time and expertise in the young; you’re investing in the future.

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