Every few weeks I see a discussion emerge that tries to dismiss the need for specialists in our industry, or refute their existence entirely. It usually goes along the lines of "I'm a [insert discipline] and I do my own [insert activity] so [insert specialism] is unnecessary or doesn't exist".
I meet a lot of in-house designers in the course of my travels and the same frustrations keep bubbling up - "how can I convince the company I work for to take my expertise seriously". It seems that companies have a pathology of hiring highly talented people but taking away the decision making abilities they need to do their job.
When I attend a conference I'm not there for the food or the venue, I'm there for the content (and occasionally the after parties). So it amazes me that conference organisers typically pay for everything but the thing people are there to see. That's right, despite the often high ticket costs, very few events pay for speakers for their time. I think this is bad for conference goers, event organisers, speakers and the industry as a whole. I'll explain.
Today I got a £20 penalty fine from TfL (Transport for London) because it turned out that I didn't have enough credit on my Oyster card. I typically use the underground so when this happens you're stopped at the barriers, giving you clear feedback and preventing you from making a costly error.
In an earlier post I discussed one reason why some people may perceive a lack of new faces on the speaker circuit — namely that by the time you reach the point in your career where you're being asked to speak at conferences, you will most likely have had so much exposure already that you'll no longer feel like a new voice.
There's a lot of buzz around technology education at the moment. The old ICT courses which taught children to be passive consumers are being overturned as schools in the UK are encouraged to set up their own curricula with programming at it's core. At the same time after-schools clubs are growing in popularity with projects like Code Club operating in nearly a thousand British schools.