In London with Junior Achievement

Later in the week I attended a series of JA-YE Meetings:

First of all big congratulations to the young entrepreneurs from Estonia for winning the@ JAYE-Europe Company of the Year Award #CoY2013! Their company 3 Little Pigs offers hands-on science shows to kids aged 6-12 in the form of private parties like birthday events. Very innovative!

As a am a member of the JA-YE EMEA Board I attended the  JA Worldwide Global Leaders Forum on Youth Unemployment in London today. I got to address the issue of Youth Unemployment in a panel with senior executives from Citi, HSBC, Huyndai and Mastercard.

We can look at the issue whichever way – at the end of the day it comes down to the fact that the careers of the future look significantly different from the job market we grew up with and we are facing today. If we believe the forecasts then:

Most of the jobs that young people will end up filling in the future do not even exist today.

Most of the kids will not have a permanent job contract with a single employer – they will work on temporary assignments.

What are some of the implications?

·         We all need to start acting and behaving like entrepreneurs

·         We need to invest in ourselves as we constantly need to market our services

·         We need to understand how to tap into the appropriate development and training programmes

·         We need to understand how the new web based business models work so we can integrate them into our portfolio of offerings

The best part of the trip to London however was the JAYE Company of the year event. Young entrepreneurs from …countries exhibited their ideas in

Finally I also enjoyed meeting with my friend and colleague Ed Gemmell to get his advice on how

Other stuff that is going on:

Coding for kids

I am a strong believer that coding for kids ought to be a mandatory course at every primary school. Children should learn how to create simple apps that provide a recognizable benefit to them. This is critical as they need to see the impact they are creating.

These could be apps that help them learn or apps that help them with “Stuf” they are daling witu everyday.

If we are successful in adding this critical component to the early curriculum I am convinced that we would have many more kids that become interesting in information technology, computer sciences, R&D, and STEM at large.

I actually want to participate in one of these courses myself - better late than never.