Steven Worrall
Managing Director, Microsoft Australia
Ceremony: 13 May 2019, 5:30pm - Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology
Well, thank you very much Vice Chancellor for that very generous introduction. Thank you also to the Pro Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, presiding deans, the University Secretary, members of the University Executive, the Council and Academic Board, staff, family, friends and, most importantly of all, of course, the graduates. It really is an honour and a privilege to be here this evening to share in this very special moment as you graduate from UTS.
As I start, I’d also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that we are meeting on here this evening and I’d like to pay my respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and extend those same respects to elders past, present future for their ongoing connection with, and their ongoing custodianship of, this wonderful land that we get to live and work on.
The acknowledgment of country is an important ritual and for those graduates who are planning to develop an Australian business career, I hope it’s one that’s very prevalent during your business career, because it’s a very important symbol of recognition and respect to the Indigenous community who have had a continuous connection with this country we call Australia for more than 40,000 years.
But of course, tonight is all about celebrating and acknowledging the achievements of our graduates here and these awards you’ve received from the UTS Business School or, indeed, from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. It truly is a significant milestone here this evening for you to receive these awards.
As has been mentioned by Attila, I studied at New South Wales at Kensington, so please don’t hold that against me; I didn’t have a chance to study in this fine institution. But having studied engineering and also having studied business, and today as we think about the business environment in which you’re finding yourself entering into, the combination of business technology and engineering-related degrees is at a very important intersection. And so, I’m very familiar with these two faculties and very pleased to be here with you this evening.
But in my short remarks, I’d like to talk about just two topics. The first is the economic future for Australia and your role in that economic future, and then secondly I’d like to talk about the single most important issue that comes up in conversation that I have with businesses small and large, with government, with educators, with pretty much everyone in the country, and that is the access to skills and the need to continue to invest in a lifelong learning approach if we are to continue to drive Australia forward in the years to come.
You may know that we have entered our 28th year of economic growth here in Australia, which is an enviable track record that every country around the world would love to have. And yet, we know also that what has bought us to this point – the composition of our economy, the skills that we have bought to bear, the intellectual capital that Australia has deployed over those 28 years may not be enough to carry us forward, given the huge disruption and the huge change that we see all around us in this increasingly digital world that we live in.
So, the need for us to adapt to that environment is ever present. From research that we’ve done, however, there are challenges for us as a nation. In fact, research that we’ve conducted with IDC here in Australia and, indeed, around the Asia Pacific region, has highlighted that there is a very big gap between the ambition that we as a nation have in the application of technology and the actual application itself.
From our research, and there are multiple reports that will broadly agree with these conclusions, we saw 80 per cent of businesses that responded to our survey suggesting that they saw technology, and in this particular case, the use of artificial intelligence, which is just one important area within the technology industry, as vital to the future of their organisations for them to be competitive and for them to continue to prosper. 80 per cent.
But of that same community, only 14 per cent were able to answer the question that they had got started – that they were in fact deploying technology and using AI inside their businesses. And so, a very big gap between aspiration and the actual implementation of the technology.
And we also know at the same time that the implementation of technologies like AI doesn’t need to be a huge undertaking. There are many – in fact, myriad – ways that technology like AI can be applied to organisations large and small to help those organisations improve their operation. And many areas that you might not expect to see the application of that technology.
One of my favourite examples is in Darwin with the Northern Territory fisheries department, which might be the last place that you’d expect to see AI being deployed. But Shane Penny who’s the research science that leads that team up in Darwin uses AI and, in fact, facial recognition software to manage and track fish species and fish stock inside Darwin Harbour. Formerly, his team would be going through hours and hours of video of those fish movements to draw their conclusions; now, that’s done automatically through the use of AI and facial recognition software.
There are literally hundreds of examples that we’re seeing across our economy of the use of technology, but the reason there aren’t more, going back to the research that I’ve referenced, is the gap that organisations are experiencing in terms of access to the skills, and that’s where, obviously, our graduating class this evening come into the picture, because quite literally there could not be a better time to look for a job in the Australian economy if you have a business or IT degree from a great institution like UTS.
Which leads me to the second comment that I wanted to reflect on, which is, indeed, this idea of a skills shortage and the need for us as a society and an economy to continue to focus on how we build those skills and maintain their currency. When I left university many, many years ago, I felt that at the time my education had finished and my career had begun. I couldn’t have been more wrong. In my career, it has been made very clear over many years that the need for me to continue to maintain my skills currency and to keep up to date with what’s happening around me is ever present, and today that truism, I think, has never been more true and today never more than right now.
And so, this idea of lifelong learning, this idea of graduating today but really commencing your education and the idea that you will need to continue to invest in those skills, I think, is central to how you should be thinking about the next stage in your career. There’s research from many organisations, but one in particular, Alpha Beta, which is an Australian-based think tank, and they have done some research based on educational inputs and outputs over the last decade or so and they’ve made some forecasts about the future.
One of their broad conclusions is that the generation that I’m from may have undertaken something like 80 per cent of our education up until the time we completed our undergraduate degree and perhaps 20 per cent after that on the job, so to speak. Their estimate for this generation is that 40 per cent of your education will be conducted as you go through your working career, and so the pendulum has very clearly swung and the need for lifelong learning and the need to have a strategy that you will use as you think about how you will maintain your skills currency I think has never been more important.
Which is perhaps the last theme I’ll get to, which is, again, graduating from UTS. This qualification has set you up so well and congratulations to you; you should be incredibly proud of that achievement. But you’re also graduating from an institution that thinks very carefully about this idea of lifelong learning.
Under the Vice Chancellor’s leadership and his team, they have focused very heavily on what it means to be an institution that helps to encourage lifelong learning. UTS encourages and connects with industry and many constituents across the Australian economy and, indeed, around the world to ensure that you have access to the very best educational resources that any graduate could posily hope to have.
And so, while I congratulate you on your achievement here this evening, I wish you well in whatever career that you choose to pursue, I’d encourage yo to leverage the wonderful resources that you have access to at UTS. I wish you all the best.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]
Speech
Well, thank you very much Vice Chancellor for that very generous introduction. Thank you also to the Pro Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, presiding deans, the University Secretary, members of the University Executive, the Council and Academic Board, staff, family, friends and, most importantly of all, of course, the graduates. It really is an honour and a privilege to be here this evening to share in this very special moment as you graduate from UTS.
As I start, I’d also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that we are meeting on here this evening and I’d like to pay my respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and extend those same respects to elders past, present future for their ongoing connection with, and their ongoing custodianship of, this wonderful land that we get to live and work on.
The acknowledgment of country is an important ritual and for those graduates who are planning to develop an Australian business career, I hope it’s one that’s very prevalent during your business career, because it’s a very important symbol of recognition and respect to the Indigenous community who have had a continuous connection with this country we call Australia for more than 40,000 years.
But of course, tonight is all about celebrating and acknowledging the achievements of our graduates here and these awards you’ve received from the UTS Business School or, indeed, from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. It truly is a significant milestone here this evening for you to receive these awards.
As has been mentioned by Attila, I studied at New South Wales at Kensington, so please don’t hold that against me; I didn’t have a chance to study in this fine institution. But having studied engineering and also having studied business, and today as we think about the business environment in which you’re finding yourself entering into, the combination of business technology and engineering-related degrees is at a very important intersection. And so, I’m very familiar with these two faculties and very pleased to be here with you this evening.
But in my short remarks, I’d like to talk about just two topics. The first is the economic future for Australia and your role in that economic future, and then secondly I’d like to talk about the single most important issue that comes up in conversation that I have with businesses small and large, with government, with educators, with pretty much everyone in the country, and that is the access to skills and the need to continue to invest in a lifelong learning approach if we are to continue to drive Australia forward in the years to come.
You may know that we have entered our 28th year of economic growth here in Australia, which is an enviable track record that every country around the world would love to have. And yet, we know also that what has bought us to this point – the composition of our economy, the skills that we have bought to bear, the intellectual capital that Australia has deployed over those 28 years may not be enough to carry us forward, given the huge disruption and the huge change that we see all around us in this increasingly digital world that we live in.
So, the need for us to adapt to that environment is ever present. From research that we’ve done, however, there are challenges for us as a nation. In fact, research that we’ve conducted with IDC here in Australia and, indeed, around the Asia Pacific region, has highlighted that there is a very big gap between the ambition that we as a nation have in the application of technology and the actual application itself.
From our research, and there are multiple reports that will broadly agree with these conclusions, we saw 80 per cent of businesses that responded to our survey suggesting that they saw technology, and in this particular case, the use of artificial intelligence, which is just one important area within the technology industry, as vital to the future of their organisations for them to be competitive and for them to continue to prosper. 80 per cent.
But of that same community, only 14 per cent were able to answer the question that they had got started – that they were in fact deploying technology and using AI inside their businesses. And so, a very big gap between aspiration and the actual implementation of the technology.
And we also know at the same time that the implementation of technologies like AI doesn’t need to be a huge undertaking. There are many – in fact, myriad – ways that technology like AI can be applied to organisations large and small to help those organisations improve their operation. And many areas that you might not expect to see the application of that technology.
One of my favourite examples is in Darwin with the Northern Territory fisheries department, which might be the last place that you’d expect to see AI being deployed. But Shane Penny who’s the research science that leads that team up in Darwin uses AI and, in fact, facial recognition software to manage and track fish species and fish stock inside Darwin Harbour. Formerly, his team would be going through hours and hours of video of those fish movements to draw their conclusions; now, that’s done automatically through the use of AI and facial recognition software.
There are literally hundreds of examples that we’re seeing across our economy of the use of technology, but the reason there aren’t more, going back to the research that I’ve referenced, is the gap that organisations are experiencing in terms of access to the skills, and that’s where, obviously, our graduating class this evening come into the picture, because quite literally there could not be a better time to look for a job in the Australian economy if you have a business or IT degree from a great institution like UTS.
Which leads me to the second comment that I wanted to reflect on, which is, indeed, this idea of a skills shortage and the need for us as a society and an economy to continue to focus on how we build those skills and maintain their currency. When I left university many, many years ago, I felt that at the time my education had finished and my career had begun. I couldn’t have been more wrong. In my career, it has been made very clear over many years that the need for me to continue to maintain my skills currency and to keep up to date with what’s happening around me is ever present, and today that truism, I think, has never been more true and today never more than right now.
And so, this idea of lifelong learning, this idea of graduating today but really commencing your education and the idea that you will need to continue to invest in those skills, I think, is central to how you should be thinking about the next stage in your career. There’s research from many organisations, but one in particular, Alpha Beta, which is an Australian-based think tank, and they have done some research based on educational inputs and outputs over the last decade or so and they’ve made some forecasts about the future.
One of their broad conclusions is that the generation that I’m from may have undertaken something like 80 per cent of our education up until the time we completed our undergraduate degree and perhaps 20 per cent after that on the job, so to speak. Their estimate for this generation is that 40 per cent of your education will be conducted as you go through your working career, and so the pendulum has very clearly swung and the need for lifelong learning and the need to have a strategy that you will use as you think about how you will maintain your skills currency I think has never been more important.
Which is perhaps the last theme I’ll get to, which is, again, graduating from UTS. This qualification has set you up so well and congratulations to you; you should be incredibly proud of that achievement. But you’re also graduating from an institution that thinks very carefully about this idea of lifelong learning.
Under the Vice Chancellor’s leadership and his team, they have focused very heavily on what it means to be an institution that helps to encourage lifelong learning. UTS encourages and connects with industry and many constituents across the Australian economy and, indeed, around the world to ensure that you have access to the very best educational resources that any graduate could posily hope to have.
And so, while I congratulate you on your achievement here this evening, I wish you well in whatever career that you choose to pursue, I’d encourage yo to leverage the wonderful resources that you have access to at UTS. I wish you all the best.
Thank you very much.
About the Speaker
Steven Worrall is the Managing Director at Microsoft Australia. As Managing Director he ensures that Microsoft meets the needs of its customers and those of the more than 11,000 partners and independent software vendors that sell or build on the Microsoft platform.
Steven joined Microsoft in March 2014 as Director of the Enterprise and Partner Group. He was responsible for driving business growth and building strong customer and partner relationships in Australian Commercial and Public sector markets. Prior to working at Microsoft, Steven worked at International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) for 22 years and held a number of marketing, sales and general management roles in the service, software and financing segments of the organisation.
He is a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the Vice-Chancellor’s Industry Advisory Board at UTS.
Steven graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) in Electrical Engineering from the University of New South Wales and has a Master of Business Administration from Macquarie University.
