Wired Sussex Blog

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Helen Kennedy introduces the World Café workshop

Helen Kennedy is Head of Media at University of Brighton. She’s an influential leader and important connecting point between the academic world and our tech and creative businesses. She is also lead research on the Refig project, with Canadian funding, aiming to instigate transformations within the games industry. Helen: Partnership is dear to the heart of Brighton University. The School of Media is only two years old. It was born out of the much bigger School of Art and Design. Not all courses are directly aligned with the challenges we’ve heard about this morning, so there is constant work to do. …

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Lunch – props to Forgotten Cuts

Lunch. We’re being fed by gluten free specialists Forgotten Cuts, regulars at Brighton’s Street Diner. They’ve done meat and vegan options served in card boxes (no plastics) over a rice salad. And it’s gorgeous.    

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Panel Discussion: The Big Challenge

Claire Hopkins introduces the panel. The discussion is around pinpointing the biggest challenges to attracting, training and retaining talent in Brighton. [writer’s note: I’ve largely removed Claire from the copy but she’s asking the questions and deftly guiding the conversation] Tom Chute I’m from Pragmatic, a 55 person company in Brighton. When we hit 30 staff we realised we need to formalise HR and recruitment, so that was me. Ed HIckey I’m from Dab Apps, based here in Brighton, I’m Commercial Director. I’ve been at Dab Apps for 2-3 years and before that I grew teams at digital product firms here and internationally. I’m …

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Chloe Langford and Zara Syversen, of Gene Commerce

Chloe Langford and Zara Syversen are both front end developers and mentors at Gene Commerce, talking together about their experience as young talents getting into tech, how each of them found Gene Commerce and are creating their paths into the digital sector. Chloe speaks about her experience in apprenticeships and in employment training, before coming to Gene Commerce. Zara, who grew up in Sweden, speaks about her own journey in work and training, especially her desire to move abroad. Once she’d got to Brighton, she decided to stay and develop her career here. When Zara came across women’s coding and networking group Code Bar she started …

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Caroline Walmsley, CEO of Further My Future

Caroline Walmsley co-founder and CEO of Further My Future and Director of progressive management consultancy Hello Sailor! – from 2014-2016 Caroline was CEO of Brightwave. Further My Future launched last summer; it’s a tech careers guidance company that speaks directly to young people, to help them make decisions about their future careers. Caroline has an unerring communication skill of talking with younger people at the start of their careers, rather than speaking down to them. Today she’s speaking on How Can We Do More For Emerging Talent? Caroline: I’ve made a shitload of mistakes as people in the room can tell you, …

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Keynote: Eugenie Teasley, Head Of Cities at Uber

10:15am KEYNOTE SPEAKER Eugenie Teasley of Uber is our Keynote Speaker. Eugenie is Uber’s Head Of Cities for the South of England. She’s been a Director of The Goodall Foundation, was the founder of Spark+Mettle, contributed to the Queen’s Young Leaders programme and in 2014 she was listed in The Guardian’s 35 Under 35 Women To Watch in the UK. Her keynote title today is What Do You Do When It All Goes Really, Really Wrong? Eugenie: I’d agreed to do this talk, before I’d even taken up the post at Uber. I’ve only been at Uber for eight weeks, so I …

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Phil and Claire’s Introduction

10am And we’re off. Doors are open. Coffee is flowing, thank the gods – and my live blog corner has become a bag drop for speakers and people working the event, which makes it feel oddly homely. Today’s Skills Summit conference delegates are an exclusive group; just over one hundred local CEOs and business owners drawn from the Sussex tech, creative and education communities, all members of Wired Sussex. Everyone throngs into the hall. Fade out the Fatboy Slim. The welcome is Wired Sussex’ own Phil Jones @philjoneswired, alongside Claire Hopkins, founding Director at Ideal. @idealhopkins @weareideal Phil: This is …

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Skills Summit set-up

Good morning, welcome to the Talent 2018 Skills Summit conference live blog, hosted by Wired Sussex for our members. [cue wrestling announcer voice…] It’s 9:10am on Wednesday 6th June, 2018. I’m Chris and I’m here stage-side (well, down the back of the hall) at Brighton University’s Sallis Benney Theatre, ready to cover the Skills Summit as it all unfolds, for the Wired Sussex blog. Ooh, someone’s saying “two, two, two” over the speaker system. I love it when non music people do soundchecks, it’s so sweet. Anyway, I’ll write up each of today’s talks with individual entries as they happen …

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Skills Summit live blog tomorrow from 9am

A quick heads up, if you’re attending tomorrow’s TALENT 2018 Skills Summit for Wired Sussex members (or if you’re not – but you’re still interested in following online): from 9am tomorrow I will be online here, live-blogging the full day. So watch this space. The speaker lineup looks terrific, so it should be a very insightful day. I’ll try to capture as much of the atmosphere as possible. You’re very welcome to communicate with the live blog via Twitter, either using the hashtag #talent2018 or replying to @wiredsussex or my own feed @lofiarts.    

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It’s all about culture – guest blog by Chris Ricketts

How do I attract the best talent? How do I hang on to my best people? How do I grow a pipeline of talent to help scale my business? Virtually all the Owners, MD’s and Directors of tech/digital SME’s I’ve met over the past year in Brighton & Hove have been asking themselves these questions…. When I spoke at Talent2017 I shared what I had learnt at eBay about how they attract, retain and develop top talent across their European platforms and classified businesses. One of my key learnings was that top tech talent essentially looks for a few key …

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