The Tipping Point - Technology & Change

“What nash are you?” “What do you mean?” “What’s your nationality?” “Australian”. “Yea but where ya from?” - 2019

I didn’t know straight up; I’d always identified as Australian. Straight out of Gawler I’d spent two years in Europe before returning to Sydney. During that time if I was asked where I was from I’d answer Australia and that'd be it. No questions. The question seemed out of place now that I was home.

My silence was a realisation that it’s a new era in this country to that which I'd known. The population of Sydney is 4.3 times bigger than Adelaide where I’d spent my upbringing. I moved to Sydney having never been there before and I was surprised to find it was so different. In this moment I understood that the mentality of my upbringing was derived from early settlers in South Australia and the culture that evolved from that event. It seems obvious to me now — it’s no longer 1901 and Australian identity still continues to evolve and also backtrack. The redundant British Empire means the next waves of Australian immigration and growth is, of course, going to be built upon and changed — the future's no what is was thought to be. The age of empires and the strategy of divide and conquer that was colonisation here doesn’t fly anymore. Expansion and growth are coming from new industries, the internet — technology.

For the period of time that I was at school in Gawler, the mining industry was booming. It peaked in 2011/ 2012 at about the time that I was asked to think about my career and what I wanted to do. I was encouraged to consider a career in the mines. However in 2013 once I’d completed school the boom was over and soon sustainability would be defined as one of humanity’s greatest challenges. The mining opportunity was never going to be relevant to me and I was never going to have a single career in one industry. What was relevant was that the demand for the boom came from China which was rising to be a global superpower. Everyone then thought that we were in Gawler, South Australia when by this time we were well and truly the Asia-Pacific.

The issue with my non-global perspective was that I didn’t have the awareness of how regional countries and the broader economic climate was affecting me. Also that I assumed that pathways were linear. To be so conservative meant that an undertow of knowledge containing industry, business and commerce was being swept from beneath me; and so the linear narrative that I was told of high school — university — job, was not realistic. Nor would achieving each stage entitle me to the next. As an eighteen-year-old, I had no idea what I wanted to do so how would I even know what to study at university in the first place after high school?

The change that I’ve seen even in the past decade is significant, young people now need to be prepared to endure increasing change to thrive. The most useful skill in the next decade is going to be adaptability, turns out it didn’t matter that I didn’t know what I was going to do. How well you adapt to the environment that you find yourself in influences your opportunities. We don’t all have the same privileges and we all have different circumstances. My circumstances changed when I leveraged the opportunities that were available to me at any given time. They may not have looked how I imagined them to but that's okay. When I left school, I wanted to travel and do something exciting. So for me my challenge was how would I support my international travel, study something exciting to be cutting edge and support myself all at the same time. The challenge got me on my way and as I began to understand “how”, I began to understand how I should think about progression differently from that linear narrative that I was presented with.

I started out professionally in marketing, working on new platform marketplaces in Europe. This is where I first became interested in technology because of the opportunities that I could access with these platforms. In Sydney, I progressed into business operations and growth roles in consumer services, technology businesses. Amongst those defining points of my career there has been scribble with internships and in different industries. It hasn’t been linear and it was tough as a young adult trying to navigate the workplace, figure out what I was good at, what I wanted to do and how to support myself.

The opportunity is for individuals to focus on managing themselves and their careers. The challenge is the mindset and leadership in industry; individuals need to be given opportunities to learn and reach their potential. I believe in most cases people are capable. Today there is not necessarily the need to be in a city such as Sydney for career opportunities. I’ve only worked in small-medium businesses, never for an international corporation. The size of operations that I’ve worked in absolutely exist here in South Australia. The reason why I would not have been able to have the opportunities that I did, I believe comes down to the mindset of leadership.

For students, for young people, for anyone who thinks that they’re inexperienced know that you’re not and you probably have experience and skill-sets — it’s just not in industry terminology. Many businesses are run like sports teams, many young people know how this works. The rules are changing; the barriers that have been there are lowering. In terms of starting your own business, every time that you complain about a service or product or experience an unsolved problem there's an opportunity. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn’t afford their San Francisco rent, so they blew up a mattress and charged people to sleep on it — this is Airbnb. Travis Kalanick spends $800 on a private taxi in New York and thinks there must be a cheaper way — this is Uber. Reed Hastings was charged $40 for returning late videos at Blockbuster — Netflix. Turns out you don't need to seek out something particularly exciting rather practical and simplistic. Embrace your challenges, they don’t make you lesser or unintelligent — lean into them.

Parents, educators, industry and government and youth especially need to recognise the undertow and the direction that it’s pulling. If we don’t adapt, take advantage of trends and look forward we’ll be left behind. The advantage of a smaller economy, such as Adelaide is that it’s easier to navigate than Sydney. For regional innovation emerging markets are able to skip development stages. A clear example of this concept is the appearance of New York City and Silicon Valley in the US. New York has enormous skyscrapers whilst Silicon Valley is a suburb full of residential streets and semi-detached villas. It seems bizarre that people commute from San Francisco city out to the suburbs for work.

I currently spend my weeks working out of warehouses in business districts. I used to work in an office building. Development will look different and there are no requirements for what it should be. It won’t look like America or Europe or Sydney. South Australian innovation should be unique. The role that Government has to play is to steer the direction and provide the resources to enable people to innovate. Innovation is everywhere and has always existed. It shouldn’t be institutionalized or a subject. Is should be something that’s in everything we do as a mentality and an approach.

When I was growing up and living in Gawler I didn’t know what a startup was and now there are many programs and hubs that have emerged. To me this is amazing. However, it didn’t matter that I didn’t know what a startup was or what innovation meant, every significant job that I’ve had has been in a ‘startup’. What mattered was that I was innovating by how I went about education, work, and travel. Innovation shouldn’t be institutionalised, it will fail. We should, however, foster it and this can be done through innovation hubs. For the success of the new economy, the most powerful thing to do is enable individuals.

We need to go beyond surface-level advice like “Top 5 tips for a standout resume” or “How to dress for success.” These are outdated tools for a workforce that no longer exists. Instead, we should be challenging assumptions, reshaping perspectives, and rewriting the rules so that young people are genuinely empowered. That means encouraging risk-taking, fostering curiosity, and recognising capability in places traditional systems often overlook. It’s not about following a fixed path — it’s about creating space for people to discover their own.