Students have headed back to college, pupils to schools, but there are also a lot of new graduates and school leavers looking to their careers now. Should they consider becoming auctioneers?

Having started at the bottom and worked my up, I have no regrets. I still think the best way in is the traditional one: starting as a porter at one of the larger auction houses, graduating to cataloguing and developing specialist knowledge in your chosen field while studying for a fine arts valuation qualification. There aren’t many courses left around the country, but they are worth doing if this game is for you.

I have also been impressed with the focus and determination of many in their teens and early twenties who have already harnessed the internet to create micro businesses involving buying, selling and collecting. The internet has created new opportunities, such a drop-sales, which simply did not exist before because there was no way of conducting them. Generation Z may be concerned with disciplines that have not played a part in our collecting tradition up till now – trainers, video games and the like – but they still follow the same patterns and rules as art and antique disciplines: rarity, condition etc.

Best of all, this younger generation has not sat in a classroom to be taught this, but has explored this world for itself and understandably has become enthusiastic about it, both because it can be profitable and because it affords the professional a large degree of autonomy.

A lot of the auction business has already gone online and I have no doubt that more will in future. However, I also believe that there will always be brick-and-mortar salerooms for people to visit, view and handle the goods first, particularly at the top end of the market where prices run into the millions. We sell via both channels.

Auctioneering as a career still holds a lot of promise and the chances of setting up your own business and working for yourself in the long term are greater than in most other industries. It’s something you might want to have a think about.

September 4 marks 25 years since the founding of Google in a garage in California. And on September 12, it will be 65 years to the day since Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments demonstrated the world’s first integrated circuit.

Technology now has history, nostalgia and rarity on its side, and is gradually fermenting into a highly active and profitable collecting market.

Retro Tech is expected to have a market base worth $51.7 billion by 2026 – almost equalling the value of the entire global art market, so now is the time to search through the attic and the back of your home office drawers for all your old iPhones, Tamagotchis, Walkmans and early Apple computers. Even basic handheld calculators from the late 1970s are doing well, while one of the most popular models in the retro world of mobile phones is the basic Nokia 3210 from 1999.

Institutions such as the Science Museum in London have started to trace the history of Apple products, from the 1984 pre-production model, Mouse for Apple Macintosh, through the 1993 Apple Newton MessagePad, the 1998 iMac G3 to the 2003 Apple iPod and the 2007 iPhone launch to the 2010 iPad.

The Science Museum has them all and provides a fascinating study of the development of technology and its association to social development over the past 30 years and more.

If this is the attitude that the Science Museum has to these objects – presenting them as museum exhibits – then you can be sure that they will also increasingly make their impact on the world of collecting in years to come. Millions of iPhones may be circulating the globe as we speak, but as they get updated and the defunct ones disappear, eventually only a limited number will be left to become sought-after collectables. The development of mobile phone technology, as they morphed into handheld computers, thereby changing the way the world communicates and interacts socially, has been the biggest game changer of all. Expect it to be a major force at auction as a whole new niche collecting area develops in the future.

When Novak Djokovic smashed his racquet against the net post in frustration during the Men’s Final at Wimbledon this year, it reminded me of another destructive occasion literally burnt into the memory.

That happened in March 1967 at the Astoria in Finsbury Park, London, when the late great Jimi Hendrix burned his guitar on stage after an unbeatable performance, almost as a ritual sacrifice to the gods in thanks. That iconic moment made the guitar one of the most sought after musical instruments at auction and it duly sold for £280,000 in 2008.

When it comes to sporting memorabilia, in the UK and much of the rest of the world, nothing beats football, especially World Cup Winners medals, which leave just about everything else standing. In 2016 Pele’s 1970 World Cup Winners medal took £280,000, setting a new record – in fact the Pele collection of football memorabilia sold for a total of £3.6m at the time.

By contrast, iconic tennis memorabilia can be had for relatively modest sums. Bjorn Borg’s racquet from the 1981 Wimbledon Final sold for as little as $18,500 in 2007, while Fred Perry’s racquet from the 1934 Wimbledon Final took £23,000 in 1997.

A London Underground poster from 1933 promoting the championship sold for £25,000 in 2012, but the top price to date is the $71,500 paid in 1992 for Bill Tilden’s 1920 Men’s Singles trophy for Wimbledon. Mind you, that’s close to $1m in today’s values.

Now back to Novak’s smashed racquet. You may have noticed that he later threw it into the crowd, directing it at his most vocal supporter, a man in a bright yellow jacket sitting behind the umpire’s chair who had spent the match waving the Serbian flag.

Like Hendrix’s guitar, its destruction probably adds to its value, and that value will already have soared owing to it being the racquet with which Djokovic played most of the final – the final at which his ten-year unbroken run on centre court came to an end at the hands of the new tennis superstar, Carlos Alcaraz. In short, the racquet is a talisman for a key moment in sporting history, and nothing gets better than that for collectors.

I have just completed a Q&A for a trade magazine, and it made me think, once again, of how the public view not just auctions but the wider art and antiques trade. While there are still a few people running cobweb-ridden, cluttered shops in country backwaters, where the stock seems to have been there from new, don’t make the mistake of thinking that auction houses and dealers are still living in the Dark Ages.

The auction process is both more complicated and exciting than retail, and that means we have to have technology that is able to do a lot more than just complete a customer’s order online.

Live bidding, previewing lots for sale with multiple images, registering bidders from dozens of different countries, fulfilling our obligations under due diligence and other regulations means we have to be at the top of our game all of the time. We’ve just added to all this by launching our own bidding platform, John Nicholson’s Direct, to give bidders a more competitive selection.

I’m delighted to say that this is as much a young man and woman’s game these days.

The excitement of buying and selling, collecting and doing deals knows no barrier when it comes to age or generation. It’s just the things that we choose to trade in that change over the years.

Even better news in the past few days is that the new generation of young adults are turning their attention once more to traditional antiques and decorative objects, having become bored with the monochrome clean lines of contemporary design.

Bedazzled by pattern, colour and craftsmanship, they are delighting in the discovery that striking pieces, from pictures to ceramics, combine well with muted interiors, enabling them to create room sets that reflect their own character and interests.

The wonderful thing about this for buyers is that many attractive items that have been out of fashion for a while can now be had for extremely competitive sums. For sellers, as such pieces become more popular, demand will catch up with supply and they will be able to make more money from them.