MICROSOFT 5 NEW MTA INDUSTRY CERTIFICATIONS: NEW HOPE FOR DIGITAL ALICE IN WONDERLAND!

With the emergence of IOT, AI, organisations shifting from legacy to Cloud-dev-interoperability, developing solutions mindsets and coding skills through new immersive modern education formats is an essential consideration for New Zealand education; in order to generate talent for many new specialisations and in demand New Zealand jobs. There are, however, very different types of programming languages, each targeting a specific need and each resulting in a very different career. Consequently, education agencies, schools and aspiring programmers need to know which programming languages can provide a secure future and take them to where they want to go - and which are gimmicks.

Scratch and Alice, gimmicky drag and drop routine, sprite movement, creators, are at the forefront of "coding" tool choice to drive the new New Zealand education "digital technologies" curriculum. Regrettably, searches in any employment search and or programming toolset/language discussion site will not find any focus on, jobs, for careers for Scratch or Alice as they are play-way entertainment toys. Students are being "taught" not to develop solutions using industry platforms, but “entertained” in moving basic cheeky characters using trial and error of drag n drop, pre-coded routines and functions. When the entertainment wears off, these limitations means students do not gain any beneficial advantages as they are not gaining creative skills, nor learning contextual "coding", through real circumstances. Indeed – with digital curriculum driving play-way through fixed (or unsuitable to 80% of learners) – such as prescribing computational thinking – the combined effect is students actually soon lose interest in the field altogether.

Python also features in schools as a "coding" platform of choice. Increasing popularity has occurred, schools, due to its simplicity and ease of adoption. This is easy to understand as although there is a new "Digital Technologies" curriculum, the education performance driver has remained steadfast at delivering basic "fact-based" learning, not experiential and or focused on human development. However, the challenge, like Scratch and Alice, industries, careers and futures are not born through Python.

Thus - for a system seeking to renew its digital technologies industrial relevance - a look at a recent USA / international survey found that 75% of all available ICT development job market listings sought to recruit candidates with full-stack or component full stack expertise. That being, .net, including C# (and related VB.net), SQL, JavaScript and java role listings made up in demand programming skill sets 102770 of the 136,616 available roles. For obvious reasons,

Scratch and Alice did not feature at all in the 'preferred' development tools rankings. Python has gained popularity as a "fun" start-up "language" (named after the fun show - Monty Python "27 of the top 39" schools in the USA say it's "fun" to teach coding with Python), and due to its "open-source" availability, subsequent popularity with data-scientists and job sites result in few industrial showings; 6% of 2017 listings (often stand-alone applications or code-library development for the education system) as Python is less likely to feature in any earth dwelling CIO's transformational and or full-stack unified technology cloud and or dev-ops strategy.

Thus with IOT, AI, streaming “big data” is spreading in every field of industry – including education. It makes sense therefore, to education in these fields and technologies. According to an EMC study, “by 2020 there will be 1.7 megabytes of new data for every person on the planet in every second”. There is no better programming language to education students upon, for jobs in this field, than SQL.

From banks, governments to automobile innovations, for the foreseeable future almost any field of industry will need a SQL databank expert, guaranteeing SQL a top rank at least the next decade. For this need, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server continues to power big businesses, small businesses, hospitals, banks, universities. Indeed, just about every computer and person with access to technology eventually touches something SQL. For instance, all Android phones and iPhones have access to a SQL database. Many mobile apps developed Google, Skype and DropBox use it directly

For an education system, such digital technologies direction means relevance, purpose and value.

Although job listing data In New Zealand is sparse, seek.co.nz and many other major recruitment services, are rich with full-stack or component-full-stack job opportunity – of the 10,700 "IT jobs" added since 2010 - full stack referring to the layers of technology developing solutions from data to end user. Therefore, from an education system and digital technologies curriculum perspective - it is important to consider the limitations and risks of educating young minds using Alice, Scratch and or Python. This, noting ICT is a major and growing business for NZ, contributing 18% or near $ 30bn of GDP in 2015 to the NZ Economy (nb: includes telecommunications). Given this, penetration in international markets relies upon New Zealand’s information and communications technologies (ICT) sector educating talent on Scratch, Alice or Python are less likely to produce diversity in: wireless infrastructure, health IT, digital content, payments, geospatial, telecommunications, agricultural technology and more.

Furthermore, with STEM a core component of education policy Alice and Scratch fundamentally prohibit STEM taking hold as they are not tools, but games and toys. The implication disables New Zealand and NZ young talent competing for a place in 71% of STEM-related world-wide job openings. Other than reinforcing the industrial or employment dissatisfaction of NCEA as a credential (in its standalone context), there are no industrial credentials in Alice or Scratch. Thus, even educating New Zealand teachers to “teach” “Alice” or “Scratch” runs the very real risk of entrenching decades of strategic drift – in the system, calcifying problems with industry-talent development and devaluing further – the teaching profession.

While so-called educational futurists believe there is no place for certifications or credentials, This is where industry certification programmes in New Zealand education come in. To secure roles, in contrast to recent mindless "anti-credentials" messages, industry certifications are the currency to validate experience and proficiency of the candidate. Industry certifications fill that industrial-education gap between what government has failed to regulate and prove what should be expected of modern day professional, including IT professionals. The fact remains - If that candidate is immersed in an environment that fosters the personal power to fail well, to develop, prove and hone the expertise, use content and techniques well enough to meet internationally benchmarked standards; they are more than likely able to show initiative, take direction and training from a higher up and “hone” their skills to real world applicable context. Immersion learning environments are, therefore, the catalyst for this.