Lets do something about the skills shortage!

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting another TLA, Jo Rabin, a leader who has a track record of innovative use of technology. We chatted about the Learning curve event, and one of the subjects close to his heart is the skills shortage.

In the early days of mobile technology, he recognised that he needed to bring people together in the mobile space, so he created a group called Mobile Mondays. This has been extremely successful and has grown from strength to strength. One of the many outcomes of Mobile Mondays was the realisation that even after over 10 years, the training for this new mobile/digital was not up to scratch.

From a collaboration with UCL, they went about building something that would fill this skills gap by creating a new style of pro­gramme intended spe­cific­ally to address the chal­lenges of teaching a very rapidly chan­ging subject. This became the mobile academy. A learning envir­on­ment designed to get an overall grounding in busi­ness, design and how to work with tech­no­logy. Par­ticipants are encour­aged to work on a project as they pro­gress through the pro­gramme of talks, work­shops, demon­stra­tions and clinics delivered by industry pro­fes­sionals who have been there and done it.

Not content on just one chance to build skills for the future, from mobile academy came a similar opportunity for those that want a grounding with games. The Games Quarter came into being. The education pro­gramme covers the things you need to know to create suc­cessful games studios and publish great games. It is aimed at start-ups and indies as well as exper­i­enced games folk from larger studios who want a deeper under­standing of the rela­tion­ship between dif­ferent design, engin­eering, mar­keting and busi­ness skills. The Games Quarter gives a broad over­view of games to help fill in busi­ness and tech­nical know­ledge gaps.

Such is the need for these types of training programmes he hopes to extend the programmes to other industry verticals. Anyone who wants to help with retail or finance, do please get in touch and I will put you in touch!