More Pacific youth encouraged into tech

Transcript

ANO TISAM: When I came back from uni, there were no tech jobs in the Cooks. And so I ended up teaching for a little bit and I was born in PNG. So my mum is Cook Island and my dad is Papua New Guinean. After teaching I went into the Ministry of Education and then I quit that and I became a consultant and did a few projects in Raro. Built up the Cook Islands Maori database, which was a language database,  and won a few awards from that.Then one day I got a call from the FFA who said they needed a systems analyst and I just applied for the job and didn't think much of it and then a few months later...

SARA VUI-TALITU: You got it...

AT: Yep I got it. They called me up and said hey you got the job and so I have been there for the last three years now and didn't know anything about it but started to get a good idea of what it is now and just buckling down now getting things moving and getting the work done. So that is basically my journey.

SV: What is your advice to youth?

AT: Just find out what you like doing and what you are good at, and then just follow that cos that is what I did. Sometimes you go in a round about way to get to where you really need to be but sometimes you just don't know. Some kids are lucky and they know what they want to do when they grow up. But some aren't but you will find it eventually. Just make sure you work hard at whatever it is that you are doing and give it your all.

SV: What are some of the hurdles to you people being able to get into tech? Is it money? Or the fact you have to learn things like coding...?

AT: It is not money. You can learn how to do things like coding on the internet. First you got to be passionate and then you got to be smart. Like tech is one of those things where you need a certainly level of smarts because it is super hard. If you can't do it, that's fine and that's okay. You can do things like sales and marketing to support the tech guys who can do it. Because you can get into different parts of tech, and it doesn't have to be coding - it can be these other parts that are just as valuable. My advice is that tech is big enough to accommodate the different types of personalities, and whatever. But if you want to get into coding side, you have got to be passionate and smart. Those are basically just the two criterias to getting that role or that job and everything else is easier and that is why not many people do tech and there is a high failure rate in our courses and stuff. But I think in the next couple of years that will probably change as coding might not be as important moving forward as a lot of this stuff like coding might get automated away .