At Manchester Digital we like to interview our members to find out a bit more about what they do and their work in the Greater Manchester digital and technology sphere. This week we're speaking with Craig Taylor, Managing Director of dotClassroom.
What does your organisation do?
dotClassroom is a digital training provider and consultancy, specialising in ecommerce and digital product and project management which is rooted in UX / psychology and home of chatbot/AI-based mental fitness startup moodglue. We’ve been teaching digital skills since 1999, starting with Windows 98 and along the way, covering at-the-time cutting-edge technologies such HTML / CSS, Photoshop, Flash, JavaScript and Magento. We now, however, focus solely on ecommerce strategy, project and product management and UX / user-centred design.
What do you think is currently the biggest issue facing the digital and tech industry?
Personally, I still think there is an unsustainable acceptance of poor project outcomes and failed digital delivery due to a lack of standards, processes, and codes of conduct. Digital project failures drive down trust, reduce profit and harm investment in digital agencies and their people.
We need to learn to be more robust, less scared of saying ‘No’ to bad clients and projects and start to have confidence in our professionalism… and charging accordingly!
What is your organisation’s biggest achievement?
We were successfully delivering online-only courses, to the US, on Zoom, long before Covid came along!
What would you consider to be your organisation’s biggest challenge?
Training within the digital and ecommerce sector is still seem as a low priority and very few agencies invest in training for their people. We are hopeful that online-only courses will now be more popular as businesses are more confident using tools like Zoom and see that online-only courses do deliver.
We need to get digital to invest… in digital!
What do you think the future looks like for Manchester’s digital and tech sector?
As we’ve been out of the scene for a while, it’s hard to say. We have seen a reduction in the number of smaller digital agencies but the start-up scene does seem to have weathered the storm and there are some really exciting new digital businesses appearing again.
Tell us something we might not know about your company?
We run dotChat, a short, free, online advice Q&A session that allows anyone in digital or ecommerce to pick our brains for 15 minutes. See our Twitter feed at https://twitter.com/dotclassroom or visit https://calendly.com/dotclassroom for more information and to book a slot…
Thank you Craig!
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