Donald H Taylor

The end of January is always a busy time of year, with the Learning Technologies Conference to chair, followed by the Institute of IT Training Awards at the Dorchester.

Last year’s post at this time mentioned the success of the conference and how I was in the same week presented the Colin Corder award an ’outstanding contribution to IT training’.

This year has been just as good.

The conference was even bigger than last year, with some great speakers and participation from delegates. The result is that we are running an extra day in April to follow up, and provide more interaction and opportunities for people to learn from each other. There’s more at the Learning Technologies blog.

This year the Colin Corder award went to someone who really has made an outstanding contribution to the industry over a lifetime. John Leighfield has a long history in IT, including being a past president of the BCS and the CSSA. Currently, he is non-executive chairman of RM, which supplies IT to the education sector.

You can learn as much about John Leighfield from his Wikipedia entry. It omits one key contribution, however. He is the man who pulled together some very disparate organisations in the mid ’90s to form the Alliance of Information Systems Skills (AISS). Based on the good existing work of the BCS, AISS created what was to become SFIA, the Skills Framework for the Information Age.

It was a pleasure to sit with John at dinner last night, and understand what drives him to improve the level of IT skills in this country. He has an infectious enthusiasm for getting the job done that definitely gets results. Long may it continue to do so.