Olongapo City – “Challenge the fundamentals,” Bernard Lee, President and CEO of Network and Economic Services Ventures, Inc., told about 1,000 graduating high school students in the first ever ICT Congress for High Schools held in the Olongapo City Convention Center last week when he spoke about the ICT careers in the 21st Century.
The internet, which according to Lee is very young and is developing so fast, offers a lot of potential for young students who would want to take a career in the ICT industry, but they have to learn how to challenge the fundamentals.
“Everything that we are using now maybe obsolete in the next ten years. In order to be good in what you are going to be doing, you have to be creative, you have to challenge the fundamentals and think differently,” Lee told his audience.
In cloud computing, for example, Lee said that students who would want to take a computer science class may ask themselves what is hot now, what is going to be popular.
The problem with studying computer science, Lee said, is that, in four years or by the time they graduate in college, what is popular now may no longer be useful when they graduate. In order to solve this, students must be prepared for things that are coming, not just by the things that are existing.
Lee was one of the speakers in the first ICT Congress for High Schools organized by the Department of Education in Olongapo City and the Comteq Computer and Business College. Other speakers were Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority Board Member Benjamin Antonio III, who spoke of enterprise risk management, and Quinton Ellick, President and CEO of Ellick BPO solutions, a call center firm operating in the Subic Freeport Zone.
The ICT Congress is the training component of the adopt-a-school project entered into by DepEd and Comteq with five biggest public high schools in Olongapo City and Zambales.
The Philippines has the most collaborative culture in Asia, according to Lee, and Filipinos can take advantage of something that we have here which, to his mind, is so valuable. He cited as an example that it is only in the Philippines where you have a share-a-load system in mobile phones.
“Actually, only a few people realize that and they are not realizing the potential. What if we take advantage of something that we have in here which is so valuable? In social networking, collaboration is going to be the wave of the future at least for the next few years to come. But in order to do that, again you have to challenge the foundation,” Lee challenged the students.
Going bigger, Asia, Lee said, can have the ability to leap frog and do much faster than the previous leaders in the ICT industry. “We have the opportunity to know what the other people’s mistake is, and not do it again. In other words, we have the ability to leap frog and do much faster than the previous leaders which are the United States, Europe and other places,” Lee stressed.
“Computer science is more of an art,” Lee contends. “If you will just take a look at coding, you are not going to see beyond the surface. While internet is so huge and is very powerful, even the United States is far behind Europe, and Asia is not really there,” he added
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“This is our opportunity and this is where we can find what is being developed, and if we can catch on to this interesting fact and seize this opportunity, then we can get something which is a lot more interesting in the future,” the visionary Lee said of the opportunities available for Filipino would-be IT experts.
The Google, said Lee, has purchased over 200 private connections with very high speed, and is paying to the roof to get the network running, and there are only a handful of companies in the world who are capable of doing that. That makes Google so special and that it is (nearly) impossible for anyone to re create Google.
“But nobody has invented FedEx for the internet and nobody has invented McDonalds for the internet,” Lee stressed. “If you want to send something from one place to the other place, you can either throw it out to the internet, and it’s very slow, it’s unbearable. Or you are going to pay through the roof and send it there yourself, but that would mean buying your own leased line.”
Anybody who can come up with the right idea for this business model is going to make a fundamental change in the way the people use the network and will have a great impact in the ICT industry, Lee said.
“And those people could be one of you, if you follow the right directions and you not take things for granted but challenge the nature and be creative,” Lee again challenged his student audience.
Lee also urged the students to “learn the concepts not just the skills because it is going to be a lifetime learning process. If you just learn the skill sets, chances are that by the time you graduate, your skill sets will already be obsolete.”
Finally, Lee said present generation IT professionals need to know how IT can apply to the industry and add value as computers are getting to be so expensive. In order to do this, Lee encouraged students to design what they have learned in college, if they are to get anything out of their education.
“If you are passive, and just sit down and try to absorb what the lectures say, you’re not going to get anything out of your degree. So what you need to do, if you really want to go into the IT industry and be successful in it, is that, you need to do research. Do some research and find out what you want to learn, and design what you are going to achieve in college” Lee told his student audience.