Since 2003, MatrixIT has supported government and non-government organisations to better enhance their client’s digital learning and find technology solutions for their needs. These projects have varied and include the following:>> Development of a remote Australia work for the dole timesheet appThe app is designed to reflect client empowerment and accountability on the ground. It encourages and supports decision-making and trust. Participants take personal responsibility for their attendance by signing in and out on the app on a daily basis. It has become a crucial component of timesheet accountability and client engagement for the organisation that uses the app. I provide ongoing support, training, and product development. >> Health services data management and reportingI work with organisations delivering health services. In particular I manage data, design workflows, executive reporting, upload to strategic data and liaise with developers on future product development.>> Simulated workplace learning – “MatrixIT Project” & "PC ReUse" Week long workplace learning projects I designed for high school students and delivered on behalf of the local area school VET support NGO. The model gives students a well rounded week of IT, business, office and communications exposure, completing a number of client and organisational projects both individually and as groups. I have delivered and refined the project since 2003, winning a number of awards for delivery. >> Bespoke digital literacy training in support of organisational outcomesThis has been as diverse as workshops for library staff to better understand client technology needs and questions, report training for executive staff in support of compliance and KPIs, empowerment training for office staff in support of productivity.>> CDP (work for the dole) consultancy and supportI developed materials and trained Work for the Dole Supervisors on their supervisory responsibilities.

In 2004 I created my own training company "MatrixIT" and moved towards RTO accreditation. MatrixIT focuses training and capacity development – with a particular emphasis on digital literacy skills in support of productivity and employment outcomes. Establishing MatrixIT as an RTO was nothing short of incredible. We were a small organisation and had to jump through exactly the same hoops that organisations much larger with greater resources jump through. Peers were astonished that we pulled it off! We developed innovative, hands-on courses in line with local needs and requirements and mapped them back Cert II and III, exactly as was intended by the great Australian VET reforms. MatrixIT was commissioned to design and deliver the following courses on behalf of various NGOs:- Simulated workplace learning – “MatrixIT Project”. delivered to high school students. - Simulated workplace learning – “PC ReUse”. delivered to high school students.- i.settle.with.IT – a one week introductory IT program for recent migrants and refugees.- i.Get.IT – a two week introductory IT program delivered for indigenous youth.- Remote indigenous digital literacy training: we literally set up a mobile classroom and took it with us across AustraliaWe also delivered the Cisco CCNA program and established a scholarship to support underprivileged youth in obtaining technical skills training and engaging with professional adults.As the years continued, it struck me that Australia was undergoing "qualifications inflation". The more qualifications available, the more of them you needed to find employment. I spoke to many a cynical trainer about the value of all these certificates, the mass pumping of students to meet revenue targets. We never played a numbers game, we played a bespoke approach in line with local needs "game". This was not always easy to articulate in a flooded market. I decided to let the RTO status lapse. I still do similar things....just not as an RTO.

WorkVentures is an NGO specialising in digital literacy empowerment. - getting people back into work through practical IT skills and training. Their 2002 annual brochure was titled "teach me how to fish" which caught my eye and I applied for a position. During my 12 months I worked on a number of projects, including development of new training courses, roll-out of new facilities in western Sydney, and work with Boston Consulting Group and Microsoft on WorkVentures' flagship PC refurbishment and resale business, making quality low-cost home PCs available for people that could otherwise not afford them. After twelve months at WorkVentures, six years in the UK, and a work profile going back to McDondald's in 1987, it was time to do something really different. It was time for MatrixIT.

I went to work for the Member for Selby, in his London office for a period of time before heading back to Australia. Important but routine work included constituency correspondence. I learnt first hand the issues affecting local constituents and the process of government in correct and timely communication. Of particular note during my short stay was liquor law reform of which the Member was instrumental in overseeing. I took great pride in seeing experiences that I was aware of in Sydney Australia making it into white papers.

This was my second IT management job while in the UK, servicing about 120 users in two offices. What I loved about this job was three things:1. Most of the IT infrastructure was in-house (as opposed to modern cloud) yet we were small enough that we had exposure to all systems. I would speak to peers who would ask me what level support I was, and I would say "all of them". The set up was the brain-child of my boss/predecessor who truly loved technology and could see the power of it to help run an organisation efficiently. Because of this I concluded that technology is just plumbing. HOWEVER, switch off the plumbing for a day and you will see just how important it really is :)2. My direct boss was astonishingly talented, hands-on, the best communicator and project manager I have ever seen! The IT I learnt from him while significant was not his legacy. I learnt how to communicate and provide a pro-active service in a sophisticated, performance-driven environment. He is the best mentor I ever had. Scary thing is he was also a year younger. 3. The opportunity to provide a direct role in change management projects. Senior Consultants were hired out at astonishing rates. Watching meetings and helping with technology and the planning of ideas to bring consultancy strategies to life was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The CEO John Smythe had worked a number of public relations roles in his life, including for Armand Hammer. By sheer chance I had heard of Armand Hammer - the man credited with being able to do business both with capitalism and communism at the same time. John Smythe could see that everything was ultimately the management of communication. He was an innovator in the industry.

I landed in London and needed a job to pay the rent. I rocked-up to a recruitment consultancy. They looked at my CV, saw that I had experience designing websites and managing data (relatively minor points on my CV) and saw it as "IT experience"On the strength of that they offered me the job as their in-house IT Manager, their current manager had just left the role of looking after the network of an operation of about 30 people. I said yes on the Friday afternoon and spent all weekend in bookshops reading every book on information systems I could get my hands on - it wasn't even clear yet if the world would revolve around IP (OK it was) but I soon discovered the company did indeed have NetBEUI along with a separate LINUX system for reasons that nobody seemed to know. Along with learning the art of communication by listening to recruitment consultants on the phone all day, the main take home was a massive escalation in my understanding of digital office technology. In the 12 months that I worked there, I:> got the organisation onto IP and connected them to the internet (it was only a LAN at that point) > designed their new website with a view to placing available jobs online for the first time as opposed to just print newspapers and magazines and commissioned developers to get this done. > managed the introduction of a new recruitment database for job candidate and vacancy matching. > ran data integrity checks and reports to make sure our candidate and employer information was accurate> responded to daily user issues that popped up in the office.

The Vocational Education and Training Advisory Board (VETAB) had the responsibility of accrediting training providers. Basically skilled educational experts reviewing organisation's courses, procedures, manuals with a view to accrediting them as providers delivering nationally recognised training. The job was to manage a team who were responsible for reviewing and collecting data on vocational training from the non-TAFE sector - private training providers (nationally recognised training providers in today's language) in order to classify and document NSW's VET services as part of the national VET framework coming into play - essentially the VET world we know it today. This required liaising with providers to verify accuracy, collect any missing information and to clarify in line with the various national classification systems for VET and employment. The team I managed did a pretty good job - it could get tedious but accuracy was important. I also spent a surprising amount of time with programmers, who were building the new VET database, learning from them sophisticated reporting techniques, query designs and data workflow analysis that would shape the career choices for the rest of my life. We completed the task around September 1997 then I called it day - resigned a promising career as a mandarin, packed up and disappeared to the UK for six years.

This role was my second within the Department of Training and Education Coordination (which subsequently became the NSW Department of Education).The department to its credit was actually ahead of its time in trying to bring vocational education and training (VET) resources online. It started with a dial-up fax service "TRAIN", where you could dial and receive VET information. This evolved into a website where people could get VET resources on the information super highway! Suffice to say we were quite excited and got a good "hit rate" for that time, especially since the domain name system had not been quite deregulated at that time (Google was the dream of a teenager and even Yahoo had yet to make its presence felt) and as a consequence the web address was impossibly long, convoluted and non-intuitive. My job was to organise and participate in workshops to promote the service (remember no social media) as well as manage the uploading of content. There where no content management tools. I simply studied and learnt (from scratch) all the html code needed to upload content. They really where frontier times and people with no formal qualifications or learning in (for example web content management) where placed in positions where they did just that, using their capacity to acquire capacity and get the job done.

The NSW Board of Vocational Education and Training (BVET) was an Agency of the NSW Department of Training and Education Coordination (which subsequently became the NSW Department of Education).BVET was literally implementing the modern day vocational education and training world that we know today. It took about 6 months before I even worked this out. Staff were mostly senior bureaucrats with a lifetime in educational policy whereas I was updating my acronym cheat sheet half a dozen times a day and wondering how the hell I will overcome the huge learning curve ahead. At first, every day was like an episode of "Yes Minister" as I mastered public service life 101. Main project work involved the research, management and funding of best practice initiatives across the state. Training organisations (both TAFE and non-TAFE) were doing some interesting things. My job was to identify such projects with a view to wider dissemination as best practice and learning models. Other project support roles included research into the state training profile which identified gaps in vocational training, particularly leading up to the Sydney 2000 Olympics. But the main take-away from this role was this was my very first adult professional job out of university....and boy did I have a lot to learn about how things are done.

The hotel is no longer there but it had a 24 hour license and I worked there one night a week from 11pm - 6am, and occasionally a Sunday afternoon. I wanted to expand my horizons as much as possible while at university so decided to take a few hours a week at this pub. I even toyed with the idea of taking managerial shifts when I finished university but decided against it. Still, a valuable experience.

At David Jones I learnt some of the old world airs and graces that I still think are important today. It was always sir and ma'am at DJs. We where all suited-and booted so we all looked like rich kids out for the day. I worked in the stationary department and also had a unique job called cash pickup, while completing my economics degree. I loved DJs because I got introduced to the whole of Sydney, all it's different types of people. I learnt so much just by observing, improving my customer service skills in the process. I learnt Sydney is a much bigger, much more sophisticated place than the corner of south-western Sydney I was growing up in, and that due to the lottery of life, I had no choice but to play catch up. Many years later I bumped into a DJs colleague at a left-of-centre conference (let's call it a Labor Party conference). Gave her a big hug and asked her what she was doing here? She noted that she was the spouse of one of the MPs, and her father worked on the trains so left leaning politics was in the blood. I expressed surprise, noting I just assumed she was a north shore girl, to which she replies "We all looked like that, we worked at DJs".

McDonald's as a fast food chain has evolved tremendously since I worked there as a kid. One of the questions I ask high school students that I work with, who work at McDonald's, is how the hell do they manage such an extensive menu these days, what's it like in the kitchen? "Crowded" is the response I get. I always regard any kid who has done a couple of years work at McDonald's with great respect. When I was looking for work many an employer were impressed with McDonald's on my CV. Employers know McDonald's works you hard so by definition you must have a work ethic. Sometimes all they wanted to talk about was my McDonald's experience. Bottom line , every kid should have a part time job growing up, and McDonald's is an eye-opener into the real world.