Making the Business Case: Inclusion and Diversity for Lancashire’s Tech Sector Businesses

The Tech Talent Charter and the Lancashire Digital Skills Partnership have joined forces to produce this Lancashire-exclusive B2B event – part of Digital Leaders’ Week, Lancashire’s Innovation Month and featuring in Digital Lancashire’s REBOOT 2020 event – on how and why to make the business case for inclusion and diversity.

More than a business fad, good inclusion and diversity practice has tangible benefits to the bottom line and companies that get it right can use this to enhance their employee recruitment and retention, especially in highly competitive areas such as digital and technical skills.

We want to support Lancashire’s businesses to attract and retain the best talent, helping to make the region as a whole the number one choice for living, working and innovating.

To join us for this discussion click here.

The panel:

Naomi Timperley: Naomi is Co Founder of Tech North Advocates and proud to be in the top 50 Computer Weekly Most Influential Women in UK IT 2018, 2019 and 2020. Naomi has extensive experience working with startups and growth businesses particularly in the tech, digital and creative sectors, is a non executive director and consultant of growth and innovation agency Alt Theory. Twitter @naomitimperley and LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/naomitimperley

Pradeep Passi, LLM, LLB, FHEA: Pradeep is Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Central Lancashire, where he has held a number of senior level academic roles. His teaching and research interests have been in the field of equality, diversity and inclusion with a particular focus on attainment gaps that are prevalent in higher education. Prior to joining UCLan Pradeep worked extensively across the public sector providing advice and guidance in relation to equality and human rights.

Adam Blakey: Adam is Creative Director of Get Your Mobi . From the age of 12, Adam knew he wanted to be in the IT industry and built his first website at the age of 13. He went to college and studied an advance NVQ in ICT and then landed an opportunity with a company specialising in websites for SME’s. Adam worked his way up to a senior manager, until the company was bought by BT. Once this happened, he saw a niche developing custom CRM systems for companies who were paper based. His big break came when business partner Lee Brady came to him with an idea about creating mobile websites. Adam was doing something similar with his clients, so they started Get Your Mobi, building stand alone websites on the .mobi extension. 10 years on, Get Your Mobi have gone from strength to strength and grew into a multi-million pound company.

And hosted by Debbie Forster, CEO – Tech Talent Charter – The Tech Talent Charter (TTC) is a commitment by organisations to a set of undertakings that aim to deliver greater inclusion and diversity in the tech workforce of the UK, one that better reflects the make-up of the population.  This covers both organisations in the technology sector itself, and organisations across all other sectors, who have employees in tech roles.  Signatories of the charter make a number of pledges in relation to their approach to recruitment and retention.  Although it is very much an employer-led initiative, the TTC is supported in the Government’s UK Digital Strategy.