Seeing this initiative made me think of my wife who has spent the last year carving out her own piece of the IT industry. Some may call me biased, true. Call it what you like, I’m taking this opportunity to put my wife in the limelight and honour her for her efforts and achievements after we relocated to the UK.The entrepreneur

After being a hard working employee for a number of years, my wife made the choice to be self employed to strike a better balance between work and being a mother of two. Also the state of UK childcare wasn’t what we were used to in NL. After a few different ventures she discovered that writing websites was what gave a healthy mix between personal contacts and exercising creativity. My wife’s strength lies in her knack for figuring out what someone needs through effective communication and then delivering as required.

The driving force

Knowing how motivated and driven my wife can be did not stop me from being surprised at how fast she mastered new technology and made things her own. Let me list some of her achievements.

Mastered CSS within a matter of weeks, I know she’ll be modest and say she knows the beginnings but she knows a lot more than she lets people believe.

Managed to pull a company through a restart and did not hesitate to re-engineer the internal processes in such a way that they are now ready for growth as well as have the ability to run at a much lower cost and with much less overhead (time and money).

The above involved a lot more than just a little bit of IT. She worked with the systems supplier to iron out kinks and smooth the processes. She introduced net-books with mobile internet for instant access to the on-line database of the systems supplier. She managed advertising and the phone system, and I could go on.

Co-rewrote the website for her father’s primary school, now a very pretty and smooth website.

Became a member of the Parents and Teachers Association.

Became a school governor.

Authored a few other websites and has a number of requests in the pipeline.

Technology

As the initial root of this is to blog about women in IT, I can state that my wife has gone from an excellent computer user to a self made IT Consultant and Web Designer. She’s still finding her way, as we all are. But she’s doing so at great speed and completely under her own strength. I want to commend her for her devotion and desire to help people make the most of available resources and her courage to venture into a world that is both riddled with people out for a cheap buck and others who have been around for so long we often look down upon those just wandering in.

Honestly commands me to say I’m probably one of the latter which doesn’t always make it easy for others, especially my wife. For my wife and all others who have a sincere desire to use IT for the better and to help people get the most out of work and life I say, “Thank you. You are desperately needed.”

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