ITP Techblog

This week we're excited to announce our first three Specialist Groups, to support growth and development in new ways or working, data, and cybersecurity. These will be awesome, helping meet the needs of these specialist areas in tech.

Also, our next Thursday Live webinar is this week, featuring Colin D Ellis talking about how to build and strengthen the culture as we move to permanent flexible working.

And we welcome 2 new members to the ITP staffing team!

 

New ITP Specialist Groups forming to support growth

As the professional body of the tech sector, one of our strengths is our broad reach - that we focus on professional development and growth across the entire digital and tech profession.

However that also presents some challenges. For example, however much we try, it sometimes means that we're not always meeting all of the needs of "sub-professions" - is specific areas within the profession that have specific and growing needs.

We're working with groups of members to address this specialisation challenge through the formation of Specialist Groups - groups within the profession with a specialist interest in particular areas.

The first three Specialist Groups being established are:

Ways of Working (WoW) Specialist Group

Ways of Working is a Specialist group for those that have an interest or work with agile, DevOps, Enterprise Service Management (ESM) and supports the delivery of value to businesses through the growth of People, Process and Technology.

This group is being formed by those who ran the itSMF New Zealand chapter. This chapter has now closed, with members transitioning to this Specialist Group.

Data Specialist Group

The ITP Data Specialist group is for those with a specific interest or practice within data - either as data scientists, analysts, and also focusing partly on the crossover between data and machine learning.

This group is being formulated in conjunction with the i4 Accelerator (Industry 4.0) and to help support the data community to work together to grow and develop this area.

Cybersecurity Specialist Group

The Cybersecurity Specialist Group is for those wanting to both develop the specialism, but also support the growth of cybersecurity skills within the profession as a whole. 

This will likely have input into both specific and general tech qualifications and credentials, alongside a skills-based approach for both groups.

These Groups will provide a vehicle for significant collaboration at all levels between group members, alongside activities and events, promoting excellence in tech practice for those within each domain of practice, providing professional development opportunities for members and advocating for the profession.

Details of how to join these Specialist Groups, and how to get involved in helping get them up and running, should be out next week.

These are the "first cabs off the rank" for our new Specialist Groups, but we're keen to help support the development of these groups in a range of areas. If you're interested in getting involved in launching a specialist group in your area of practice, get in touch!

 

Next ITP Thursday Live

ITP's magazine-style fortnightly Thursday Live Webinars are back! Next up is a talk and Q&A with culture and project expert Colin D Ellis.

If you haven't been to one of Colin's talks before, you're in for a treat. He's a multi-award winning author, presenter, and "doer" around getting outcomes from projects, teams and people.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic the ability to work in a hybrid way was generally only considered for high value employees. For everyone else, the ability to be able to work a variety of hours in multiple workspaces was a dream.

Not any more - the virus has changed that.

We've all done the short-term flexible working thing - now it's about embedding the right culture in the longer term, and Colin has literally written the book on it.

As always, the Thursday Live Webinar will kick off with our Tech NewsChat Panel talking through the big stories of the week and will finish with extended Q&A with Colin.

The live webinar is free but you'll need to register. 

More info and Register here

 

Live Online Cybersecurity courses - filling up fast

We've had heaps of requests for cybersecurity courses in recent times, so have scheduled 2 live online short courses for October.

These are detailed workshop-style short courses facilitated by cybersecurity expert Dr Elf Eldridge. While there is a cost to attending them, we've kept the cost as low as possible. But do get in quick - places are limited and they're almost sold out.

NZISM Fundamentals - 5 Oct 2021

The New Zealand Information Security Manual (NZISM) is the New Zealand Government's security compliance handbook. It contains both a risk management framework and a number of security controls that NZ government agencies are required to have and that many NZ organisations are encouraged to have.

This NZISM fundamentals course highlights the most significant areas of the NZISM. 

More info 

Cybersecurity Incident Response - 7 Oct 2021

The impact of cybersecurity incidents, most notably ransomware, can be devastating for almost any organization. From the loss of critical business services to the disclosure of sensitive information, it has become clear that having a process to mitigate harm during an incident is something that is critical for most organization that want to improve the security maturity. This course has been updated to more accurately reflect the incident response landscape as of 2021.

The cybersecurity incident response course is intended for those wishing to develop or critique their incident response processes.

More info

Get in quick! Places are very limited and as mentioned above, these are almost sold out.

 

New ITP team members

This week we welcome two new staff members to the ITP team:

Frank Lewis joins our administration team, helping our very busy team keep on top of the various projects, initiatives, and BAU administrivia. Frank joins us from Wednesday and we're really looking forward to him coming onboard.

Kenny Williams-Stockdale also joins our team as National Student Coordinator, helping us bring together our new ITP Student Council to put in place a plan to better support our student members and their transition to industry.

A huge welcome to Frank and Kenny!

 

Become an ITP Mentor

As many ITP members will be aware, we recently re-launched our Mentoring programme for tech professionals. The free programme helps our people set clear career goals and objectives, understand that they have the ability to achieve these, and put in place a plan to do it.

The launch has been a huge success... so much so that we need more mentors! We're especially looking for senior developers, people who have moved from ops into management roles. and anyone with gaming or design type experience.

The process is super easy, and we provide induction, guidance, resources etc - you're not on your own.

Does that sound like you? Check out more info here

 

Get your ITP gear

Now is the perfect time to head over to the ITP store and grab yourself some sleek and practical items for work and play. These customizable items come in a variety of designs and are perfect for work, networking or casualwear.

The official ITP store has a whole bunch of professional and casual clothing options, some which can be co-branded with your company. It's a great opportunity to show that you don't just "do IT" - you're also serious about professional practice. 

Pop on over to shop.itp.nz to check it out. Deliveries after Wellington drops from L4 lockdown.

  

Videos from ITx 2021 Innovation Days now available

A big selection of videos from the ITx Innovation Days in July are up on the ITP Video Library - free for all ITP members.

The talks include:

• David Downs: Accelerating the tech sector
• Elf Eldridge: Cyber Security in a broken world
• John Olsen: Team culture - How to innovate with the best people
• Aaron Hodder: Responsible Digital - Humanity in Technology
• Rasha Abu-Safieh: GGateway: Transforming lives through Tech
• Minas Liarokapis: Innovation in Robotics and Bionics
• Rob England: Crossing the Streams - the nexus of ITIL, DevOps, and Agility
• Jocelyn Cranefield: From fun-lovers to institutionalists: Uncovering the subcultures of kiwi IT workers
• Liam Malone: On top of the world - turning disability into ability
• Anthony McMahon: Why work harder when you can work smarter?
• Igor Portugal: What does post-Covid IT architecture look like?
• Ray Delany: Is the traditional consulting model broken
• Mark Harrison: Service Management: a panacea for uncertain times?
• Billie Jordan: The Hip Op-erations Crew - Inspiring the world's oldest hip hop crew
• Terry Chapman: Why your next job might be remote and what new skills you need to succeed at it
• Andreas Drechsler: The Future of IT Governance and Business/IT Alignment in Scaling Agile Organisations
• Russell Ewart: Transformation at scale: Harvesting the value of Customer centricity during change
• Panel: Surviving and Thriving in today's changed world
• John Ascroft: Ethical principles in multi-modal application development: a BARJ case study

As an added bonus, we've also added the following videos from the CITRENZ 2020 virtual education conference to the library:

• Daniel Dang: A Case Study of Using SCRUM Framework to Teach OOP Concepts
• Alex-John Clark: A Medical Emergency Response System for Elderly
• Brett Davidson: Automation in a Lab Network
• Sunitha Prabhu: Cross-disciplinary Interactions in Work-integrated Learning
• Kim Hagen-Hall: Evaluating Scrum for managing Indra's automated vote-counting system implementation
• Minjie Hu: How to Teach Test Automation in Software Testing
• Noor Alani: Improved Feature Selection and Ensemble Learning For Cervical Cancer Assessment
• Bernard Otinpong: Mobile App Development Course During Lockdown - A Reflection
• Ram Roy: Sentiments analysis of the feedback from a business simulation game - Quantifying the unquantifiable
• Daniel Dang: The Implementation of a mini MVC-based Framework to Teach Web App Development
• Emre Erturk: Using Blockchain and Tokens for Education: Fad or not?

While you're there, check out heaps of other talks, including a couple of our favourites from the 2019 ITx Rutherford Conference:

• Seeby Woodhouse: How to find fame, fortune and inner peace
• Dheeren Velu: Artificial Intelligence - Trends and Ethics
• Panel: Technology and the Future of Work

The ITP Video Library has a heap of content not available anywhere else - talks and presentations from experts on topical issues, all free for ITP members.

There are some absolute gems in the library - do check them out.

Check out the ITP video library here

 

Previous webinars - all available free to members

All past webinars are available on the ITP Video Library for members:

• Digital's role in the Health Reforms
• 2020's Top 10 Hacking Techniques
• Down-to-Earth Leadership Skills for Technical Geniuses
• How technology enabled the health response
• How Covid is impacting the Gaming Industry
• Creating a plan for Digital Skills
• Cybersecurity and the recent attacks
• Tech legal update - what you need to know
• An afternoon with Nanogirl
• Taking kiwi tech to the post-Covid world
• Tech startups in a post-Covid world
• The IRD Transformation
• Digital Government and Covid-19
• Tech and the Covid-19 recovery
• Privacy in the days of Covid-19
• Leading Wellness in uncertain times
• Meet the ITP Workshop Presenters
• The data behind Covid19
• Innovation in tough times: Don't Hunker in the Bunker
• Covid19: Tech and the Law
• Cybersecurity from home
• Clarke Ching on disaster innovation
• CITPNZ and CTech: The What, How and Why
• Working Remotely - How to get through

Check out the webinar section here