The growth of our membership and of the industry as a whole saw us create and launch a whole range of new products and services during 2014. We launched the first ever DPM:UK Conference for the digital project management community in the North which saw over 250 attend and will now become an annual event.
We grew the Digital Skills summit grew into a four day festival, with additional learning opportunities for students. Record number of graduates and apprentices attended Talent Day. Skills and talent development is keeping us really busy and there is still a long way to go before our companies have access to enough skilled technical talent. We will continue to work on this agenda and will be addressing issues that matter to you such as wage inflation and work readiness at next year’s Skills Festival.
We shook things up with the Big Chip Awards: moving to The Midland Hotel for the first time in its history and it turned out to be a great decision; the event was a total sell out with 420 in attendance and the quality of entries was astounding.
Our annual elections were once again hotly contested and 3 new members joined the council: Dan Donald, Amy Shapiro and Tom Cull, all bringing enthusiasm and exciting ideas to the table.
We launched our new training courses and so far we have trained over 150 people in the 6 months we’ve been running them and expect this number to triple in 2015. By working with members to find out exactly what you need we were able to evidence demand to various funding bodies which meant we could offer subsidised training, we hope to do even more of this in 2015.
We ran the North’s first ever Magento Developer conference. It was a great team effort with many of our members getting stuck in to source speakers and suggest content. We’ve had fantastic feedback already and intend to run this again in 2015.
Northern Powerhouse is a phrase that most of us are bored of hearing by now but it does offer some great opportunities for digital businesses. The £1bn devolution deal amongst other things gives Manchester control over its skills budget and we will be working hard with relevant bodies across the region to make sure we are developing the right pipeline of tech talent for our members.
We’ll be back again on Thursday 8th January. We wish you all a very happy festive season!
