Manchester Digital, the digital trade body serving the North West, is organising a Digital Skills Festival to help tackle the digital skills shortage, which continues to be an issue for the region.  

The skills festival is a 4-day event, which is going to be held from 11-14 February at Manchester Town Hall and is held in partnership with the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce and Manchester City Council.

The event aims to bring together students, organisations and digital professionals to highlight, address and discuss the issues facing the sector. As well as tackling these issues on a practical level by offering tours of local digital businesses, there will also be a recruitment fair and a chance to give local school children some hands on practical experience of digital.

The event is also a chance for Manchester to showcase and involve the some of the best of digital business in the area including: the BBC, Auto Trader, EON Reality, Building Blocks, Code Computerlove, Space 48 and PushON.

There is still plenty of opportunity for businesses to get involved and take part by attending the free conference event, exhibiting at the Talent Day, or agreeing to open up their businesses for the Open Studio Day.

Commenting about the Digital Skills Festival, Business Development Director at Manchester Digital, Katie Gallagher, said, ‘Manchester has an ambition to become a ‘truly’ digital city, and here at Manchester Digital we want this to be realised. However, we’re increasingly aware that in order to achieve our objectives as a digital city we need a large, highly skilled digital workforce and a pipeline of talent that will leave school, college and university with industry standard, work ready, digital skillsets. This is one of the reasons why we organise to the Digital Skills Festival – an event that will provide insight to the next generation of digital talent.

‘Last year’s Digital Skills festival has had fantastic feedback from Education organisations and businesses involved. We’re positive that this year’s skills festival will be bigger and even better than the last.’

If you’re interested in getting involved with the Digital Skills Festival or taking part in the various events click here.