PeopleCert

I had never eaten melon with feta before. I certainly hadn't had it at the start of a meal. "But it's the best appetizer for raki," says Byron Nicolaides as he poured. "In the summer, when I'm on an island, as soon as I sit at the table, I ask if they have good melon, and they look at me with confusion.

One of the largest certification companies in the world, PeopleCert, which certifies people for skills in management, auditing, IT and language learning, with a presence in 220 countries, although just 21 years old, is Greek.

With the increasing expansion of automation and artificial intelligence, the issue is how the nature of work itself is changing in a constantly developing digital world, demanding constant adaptation. This is the challenge faced by every age group in the workforce.

The Athens University of Economics and Business has bestowed its annual entrepreneurship award on Byron Nikolaidis, the president of the non-profit Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS) and founder/president of PeopleCert.