Digital City Festival 2022 - Building Greater Manchester’s Future Digital Workforce

With the digital skills shortage at its most challenging levels ever, this session of Manchester’s Digital City Festival aimed to highlight the initiatives that could help address the crisis. With diversity and inclusion being the main themes, we were given insight into how large organisations like Microsoft and CapGemini along with HR and skills organisations combine to  build talent pipelines to help future proof Greater Manchester’s tech talent.

One of our Managing Partners, Colin Telford, attended the  Building Greater Manchester’s Future Digital Workforce event at this year's Digital City Festival. Here are the key points from the discussion:

How do organisations work together to make our workforce more inclusive and grow our digital pipeline?

Keynote Speaker, Lee Jones, Digital Skills Lead at Microsoft, gave her thoughts around culture and opportunities that bring diverse talent into their business. They are finding that they need to identify and support different groups of people - e.g. students, those made redundant or re-skillers. Their approach is to empower these people using their digital products and online training. 

Microsoft creates a culture of constant and lifelong learning through hybrid learning.  This enables staff to get the skills they need and develop professional, cognitive and communication skills to succeed. 

Lee’s personal background from a council estate in Manchester highlights the potential from people of all areas. Now at her level, she hopes that many can be given the opportunity to be equally as successful to make an impact.

Helping those returning to work

Beckie Taylor from Tech Returners focusses on those returning to tech roles after time off, e.g. maternity leave. They enable women and men to transition back into roles, placing hundreds of women back into employment. They exist to help overcome the bias of recruiting women back into roles and employers that have issues with career gaps. They have issues with the CVs not telling the full story, especially where there is a break. They instead provide a document highlighting their real skills (which they have renamed soft skills to be) and potential to help them be considered better. Employers must be aware of the need for different requirements from these employees, e.g. flexible working because of childcare.

Opening opportunities to anyone

Gunnar Menzel from CapGemini explained that they have set up programmes for refugees to enter their business for tech and IT jobs. This is one pool that can help add valuable talent to your business. When it comes to young people, skills that they see are important include real skills like communication, problem solving and team working. With CapGemini recruiting 800 graduates a year, they see many applications failing because of a lack of these real skills.  

Accessing the right talent

Liz Scott from Tech Nation looks after a network of scale ups of thousands of organisations. Raising money isn't the main issue anymore, it’s the access to talent that becomes a huge issue especially with the increased investment and scale. This has led them to look in all sorts of areas for additional talent and therefore it’s important that the organisations provide a realistic environment for a diverse workforce to flourish. Scale ups aren’t effectively creating a pipeline of talent and resulting issues like mid weight developers out earning the founders isn’t sustainable. They need to get involved in these initiatives in order to make them work for their business. 

Consider new ways of working

Emma Grant from Manchester Digital ran a skills assessment earlier this year and highlighted the top 10 in demand roles starting with developers and going through to digital marketing and project managers as the top 3. In fact, 2/3 of businesses see developers as an essential requirement for businesses moving forward. With 73% of business increasing revenue and 70% of business reporting an increase in staff in the last 12 months, 60% of businesses expect a need for hybrid working moving forward. It is clear that businesses need to adapt and provide a new normal for ways of working and recruiting. Businesses are not struggling with fresh talent, its talent with a few years experience that are in short supply. 

Think about your future talent pipelines

In summary, businesses are encouraged to think about their future pipelines for talent. This involves looking internally at your business and making it accessible. Working with external organisations like Manchester Digital, Tech Returners or Tech Nation will help advise on investment that is needed to achieve your longer-term goals. These organisations are partnering with The Princess Trust to connect with pools of young people into jobs as it opens much more potential workforce. 

You'll find The Candidate at stand #230 at the Digital City Expo at Manchester Central Convention Complex event on the 9th and 10th of March! (Follow our Instagram for BTS updates and exclusive content!)

To register for your FREE ticket, click here!

To find out more about Digital City Festival 2022, click here!

For the full line up of events, click here!

Read our latest news here.

Take a look at all our job opportunities in Technology here!

Check out our digital jobs here.

Fancy a new analytics challenge? Click here!  

If you're looking for a new role, get in touch with us today! 

Learn more about our marketing roles here.

If it’s creative roles that you are after, click here.

Progress your career with a brand new Contract role? Click here!

To get the very latest jobs, news and blogs follow The Candidate on Linkedin here!