By Katie Gallagher, managing director of Manchester Digital and chair of the UK Tech Cluster Group
Despite the current leadership contest within the Government, high inflation and a possible recession, the UK is still in a great place to continue developing the tech industry across the regions.
There has never been a more critical time to focus on creating more high value jobs and high productivity, or to focus on developing the regional tech eco-systems.
As chair of the UK Tech Cluster Group, I have recently been appointed onto the Government’s Digital Skills Council, along with a number of other ministers, academics, tech organisations and tech entrepreneurs to work together to address current and future needs for digital skills and to develop more digital jobs.
The council has been set up to:
promote routes into digital careers and opportunities for the labour market to re-skill and up-skill to meet current and future employer needs
increase awareness of resources that enable pathways into digital and digitally enabled jobs for workers in non-digital roles
promote mechanisms to provide increasingly diverse access to digital roles and digitally enabled roles
A changing society
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many businesses had to undergo speedy digital transformation to keep up with demand and are still seeing increased sales due to ongoing changing consumer habits.
The future is digital - this has been known for a long-time, but we need to ensure that we have a workforce with the right tech skills to develop the whole of the UK as a global tech powerhouse. The Government has ambitious aims to transform the UK into a digital economy - but there is still an enormous job to do closing the growing tech skills gap, in upskilling the workforce, and developing more tech-focused talent pathways right from early school-age.
Driving forward the tech agenda
The UK Tech Cluster Group are looking forward to working alongside a group of tech leaders, ministers and organisations to develop the UK regional tech industry and help it thrive and flourish. Bringing experts together with in-depth knowledge of the regional ecosystem is the best way to develop a strong tech-based future across the whole of the UK.
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