Benson Award History
This award originally started as the Pearcey National Award for Young Achievers.
One of the primary goals of the Pearcey Foundation is to promote the ICT sector to all Australians and in so doing attract the best and brightest to make a career in our industry. The future of our nation rests, to a large extent, upon our national science and engineering capability – the Pearcey Foundation is committed to securing our future as a nation by attracting the best and brightest into science and engineering and ICT, in particular.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has generously agreed to support the Pearcey Foundation in these efforts by underwriting the Foundation in its efforts to recognise outstanding individuals drawn from the next generation of young engineers, scientists, and ICT professionals nationally. This is being achieved through a program of state based awards presented each year at events supported by like-minded industry organisations including AIIA, the ACS in each state, the ACS Foundation and AiG.
To lift the profile of these awards, the Pearcey Foundation, with the active support of CSIRO through their ICT Centre, will now present this Pearcey National Award on an annual basis. The winner of this award will be selected in the following manner: 1. An independent selection committee will be drawn from the state based Pearcey Committees 2. The criteria will based upon the criteria already established by each Pearcey State Committee 3. The finalists for the National Award will be the winners of the prior year Pearcey State Awards (in the case of 2011, there were 6 winners in 2010 as WA was not able to participate unfortunately)
The intent is to announce and present the winner with this award at one of the Pearcey State Award events. During the day preceding this event, the finalists will be involved in a program of activities to expose them to various aspects of ICT that they might not otherwise experience such as visits to local R&D Labs (Government and private sector), presentations from subject matter experts relevant to the ICT sector and an opportunity to inform each other of their experiences.
