When I was in high school back in the 80’s in small-town northern BC, my high school guidance counselor questioned my decision to pursue post-secondary education with the rhetorical question of, “ Why would you ever want to go to university, when you already have a great job in the sawmill?!?” These roles are just as important to creating a sustainable tech ecosystem as the engineer or application specialist. The tech job of the future is for anyone interested in business, finance, marketing, project management, logistics, or customer support. And likewise, the tech job of the future is not limited to the engineer, the programmer, or the researcher. I believe that every job will be a tech job or will require those employed to have a technical competency: from reading GIS in forestry, to operating diagnostic equipment in healthcare, to drone maintenance in agriculture, to inventing new wireless mesh technologies (as we are doing), and so on and so on. The BC of tomorrow will have technology at its core. And while a lot of the debate post announcement focused on implementation details, I believe many missed the underlying tone of the strategy and the plan. I talked about how we started, where we received our first angel funding, how we dealt with failure, how we built our team, what was working well (and what wasn’t), and probably most prophetic … I talked about the 10 Core Values that we had built our company around, our value of Community, and how important Our Values were in building a company that could be proud of.Įarlier this year, the province announced a multi-year #BCTECH strategy that involved, $100M BC Tech Fund for investment, grants for training employees, and perhaps most importantly, several programs focused on youth tech education. I shared stories from both our company’s history as well as my own personal journey through BC’s tech scene. Apparently, we had already achieved the level of success that would classify Left as a tech titan for today.Īt the gala, however, I started to talk with a lot of the other students in attendance and other young tech entrepreneurs. I must admit, my first thought was, “ Hey that’s cool, they think that we are one of tomorrow’s tech titans!” But then I learned that I was invited because they wanted me to advise a few of those that were actually tomorrow’s tech titans.
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This is called the Spirit of BC Tech award, and yes, we want to win… but this one is actually bigger than us.Ī few years ago, I went to the BCTIA Gala banquet as a guest of the Maple Ridge Economic Development department whom had sponsored one of the tables for ‘ Tomorrow’s Tech Titans’.
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It is about another BCTIA nomination announced the same night, where all Tech Impact Award finalists are eligible for a People’s Choice Award’ to be awarded the night of the BCTIA Gala on June 7, 2016. However, this blog post is not about that nomination or our Community Engagement program. By engaging their employees, winners of this award are focused on building a corporate culture that has a positive impact on the community in which they live, work, and play.”įor those of you who know Chris or myself (or for that matter, for those who know any of the proud Lefties that give up their time to get involved in our Community, and make Left the Best Workplace in BC), you know that Community is at the heart of both ‘what’ we do and ‘why’ we do what we do. “This award recognizes a company that embraces corporate social responsibility. This is the same award that we were so humbled to win last year, the criteria for which states: On Thursday night we learned that Left had been named a 2016 TIA Finalist in the category of Community Engagement.
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The Spirit of BC Tech - What is it and Why You Should Vote.