Is Greater Manchester Ready To Go Digital?
If you haven’t heard already, we have a skills shortage in tech. Here in our hometown of Manchester — recently named second in a list of the U.K.’s top ten cities for digital technology in tech — that shortage is impacting 65% of digital businesses looking to recruit and retain talent.
Not good news, when you consider the industry is the second biggest in our regional economy and accounts for £4.1 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA). In purely commercial terms, the opportunity cost of not investing in talent is, well, costly.
As the birthplace of the industrial revolution, how Greater Manchester responds to this new wave of economic potential will not just determine our future standing on a global stage, but the future prosperity of our region too.
People Equals Profit
Recently acknowledged as the second most deprived local authority in the English Indices of Deprivation, the city at the heart of our region is seeing inequality widen. Entrenched pockets of poverty encircle the ever-growing skyline, and the influx of big tech and nationally dispersed talent is further removing our own citizen’s potential to access the local labour market.
So, developing digital skills, from design and development to digital media and creativity is paramount, for both people and profit, and requires local government and Manchester’s rapidly growing tech scene to come together, and now. Backed by the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham’s vision for Greater Manchester makes clear the region’s ambition.
“I want Greater Manchester to be a digital city with a difference — one with a bold digital economy which actively encourages businesses to invest and grow, and also one where technology is used to deliver positive change, from connecting young people with opportunities to tackling social problems such as homelessness. This bold vision places the needs of people firmly at the heart of technological innovation.”
Yet, the pace is slow and the opportunities currently available aren’t wholly accessible. While coding schools are fast becoming ten a penny, the £6,000 entry fees aren’t affordable to the vast majority of the region’s populace. Scholarships are available — Northcoders and Thoughtworks recent partnership to encourage women into tech helps even the playing field — but we need more.
Institutional Investment in Skills
More for adults, but to truly futureproof Greater Manchester, investment at a younger age is needed too, with availability to more than just the privileged few. Manchester City Council’s current high school digital audit should help. Looking in-depth at the curriculum, culture and resources available to teach digital skills, the report due next year will help shape our local response.
Regionally, however, we need action, and GMCA is currently underpinning two important pieces of work. Digital Futures, led by the team at Manchester Digital is helping shift understanding, expectations and aspiration in the education systems, simply through bringing industry to the table, then engineering the all-important work placements and apprenticeships that help bridge the gap.
Go Digital, on the other hand, is working at the coalface, and already making headway in schools across the region to bring digital skills and tech careers to life. Running week-long sprints for Year 8 students, hundreds of 12–13 years across the fifty Greater Manchester-based schools will experience in-depth digital training to provide a taster of the potential of tech.
Cross-Sector Collaboration
Underpinned by The Federation residents InnovateHer, Digital Advantage and HIVE Learning, these three pioneering organisations have brought their respective specialisms in gender, SEND and interactive learning to bring in-depth digital training to the region’s education systems, as well as engaging role models covering a whole range of careers to inspire potential future talent.
Speaking with InnovatHer’s Jo Morfee — on the imperative surrounding digital education;
“We believe it starts young — if anything at primary school. Yet, only 42% of schools in Greater Manchester offer computer science and only 8% of pupils are taking it”.
Starting at secondary education, where GCSE’s inform further education and careers advice begins, makes sense. Add to that the challenge of only 21% of computer science students being female, despite their outperforming boys at the subject, and the gender issue in tech becomes a gender issue in education too.
With the interactive and practical workshops drawing on industry methodology, the programme — due to enter its second delivery phase this month — is running over 18 months across the ten Greater Manchester boroughs. Covering five SEND schools and ensuring 50:50 gender diversity, the combined authority backed project intends to build a critical mass in the region.
Digital Skills Momentum
On the format being spearheaded, Andy Lovatt of Digital Advantage commented;
“Learning by doing with others is not that new — it’s just been squeezed out the curriculum over recent years. It’s been well argued by Ken Robinson that kids respond and learn better by doing things. By getting them to do things creatively with digital kit, be that a robot or a website, it makes the learning fun, and fun sticks in the brain better”.
Essential when you consider that digital and technology-based skills aren’t covered in computer science, and therefore play no part in our current curriculum. With teachers also limited in their understanding of the nuanced opportunities available across the industry, the Go Digital consortium will focus on bringing to life the realities of roles in digital too.
The immediate focus is on engaging students in design sprints and prototyping, followed by wireframing and coding, then pitching to clients. Using real-world problems — a recent project asking students to consider the challenge of bed wetting at Alder Hey — assessing audiences and understanding user experience needs, the programme also exposes students to diverse user experience designers, coders and project managers.
Getting Involved
With mentors from Co-op Digital and Tech North Advocates already delivering sessions with the three project partners, the opportunity to not just mentor but influence study choices is key.
“29% of male teachers would not recommend a female for a tech career”
With stats like these influencing InnovateHer, having role models like Naomi Timperley and Hera Hussain on board is vital to demonstrating what women in tech can achieve.
Longer-term, the hope is for the interactive and real-life problem-solving model to be more widely engaged in across the education system, and for the cultural impact at the grassroots to work its way upward to policymaking. With a keen eye on both A-Levels and T-Levels, Andy Lovatt is clear on the public sector’s role as pivotal in ensuring the local tech’ industry’s success.
“If we want to make an impact on the scale that is needed to fill the digital skills gap, then we need the government to act in a much more concerted way. That means more money for effective training each and every year for at least the next ten years; SMEs and well-motivated individuals cannot supply the skills and talents needed to fill the 30,000 digital jobs that each year will be coming through in Manchester.”
With investment, imagination and collaboration fundamental to GoDigital’s success, we simply need Greater Manchester’s public sector, supported by our region’s businesses, to commit to our collective future. The question is, are we up for it?
