Last week was a busy one for the Wise team as we played a huge part in the UK’s largest regional tech festival as a headline sponsor of Birmingham Tech Week!
As the headline sponsor of Digital Skills Day within the week-long celebration, we were heavily involved in the schedule, with expert talks, panels on inclusivity within the sector and an amazing evening event in the heart of Birmingham.
Birmingham Tech Week was founded to bring together the thriving technology sector in the region, with employers, talent, recruiters and industry professionals coming together to share insights and offer support to each other in a range of ways. With events held across the city,
At Wise, we are passionate about improving diversity and inclusion within our industry, we work with organisations such as The School of Code to hire diverse, emerging tech talent into our business. This way, as we develop this talent and give them opportunity to learn new digital skills we’re widening the talent pathway for the entire region as a whole.
First up from Team Wise, our CPTO James Orton and Head of People & Culture Hannah Jarrad, spoke at The Digital Symposium on Thursday. They gave a talk all about how Wise went form a start-up to a scale-up business, discussing the challenges and successes around recruiting so much tech talent in such a tumultuous couple of years.
Key takeaways from the talk:
- The importance of providing training and development to junior digital talent, particularly when you’re wanting to build out teams moving forwards
- Considerations within recruitment – having to choose the right partners to be able to improve diversity and inclusion
- Creating a culture that we can be proud of is important from a retention perspective. This is especially important if you’re wanting to build something new, competing with more established businesses for the same small talent pool
The second event we held was our Women in Tech Roundtable featuring an expert speaker panel. Our panel discussed what both individuals and employers can do to improve the inclusivity for women within technology, putting together a guide for women looking to make a move into a digital career.
Did you know that, in a recent report commissioned by Women in Tech, 58% of people felt that their gender limits their future opportunities. Statistics like this are the reason why we continue to speak on the subject of inclusivity within tech, reflecting on what we can do moving forwards to address this.
We ended the day by hosting a fun evening event at The Button Factory in Birmingham. The night consisted of good food, good tech talk and great music. We wanted to end the day with a celebration, bringing the whole of the Birmingham tech community together – and what a celebration it was!
