What is your social mobility project? Please provide an overview:
The Tech Career Connector is QA’s fund-raising initiative urging our extensive levy paying network to pledge ambitious donations from their unspent apprenticeship levy.
Currently an average of £1.1bn per year of levy funds are not being spent and are going back to the treasury!
Our objective is to raise £15m over the next 12 months and change the lives of 1000 diverse individuals, empower them to start a career in tech with small businesses in the UK and fight against the growing digital skills gap.
This is more than just money, large companies can pledge expertise along with their unspent levy to make a real difference and not only change people’s lives, but also support them to create a community of diverse individuals who have been empowered by the knowledge, support and information required to take the step into a tech career. This transformative project will plug into the hardest to reach communities such as prison leavers, the lowest IMD Deciles, and regions around England to create job outcomes over the country.
TCC has created a mechanism to ambitiously raise funds through apprenticeship levy share from the country’s biggest organisations that will pay for tech apprenticeships across the country’s network of small businesses.
Raising £15m over the next year can change the lives of at least 1000 diverse individuals, empowering them to start a career in tech with small businesses and fight against the growing digital skills gap and ever increasing cost of university.
By mobilising partnerships with vendors and business networks, communities and social enterprise, the initiative will reach more people and more businesses who can benefit from this initiative.
How did your project come to fruition?
We partner with lots of large apprenticeship levy paying clients such as Microsoft, Salesforce, LIDL and Nationwide, and they have such large apprenticeship levies that it is almost impossible to spend it all. That means that unspent levy will go back to the treasury. However, companies can ‘gift’ up to 25% of their levy to small businesses who would otherwise have to pay commercially towards apprenticeships. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and but hiring tech talent is highly competitive particularly when competing with large companies and it’s even harder to reach a diverse representation of individuals so it becomes a cycle which contributes to the ever widening skills gap in our economy.
The TCC team at QA came together through a passion for supporting diverse individuals into meaningful tech employment led by Anita Ibrahim, Director of Social Impact. Together, they started to talk to QA’s biggest customers to ask if they would be willing to donate their unspent levy to a
fund dedicated to increasing diverse hires into tech roles with small businesses in England, and to their delight, they’ve secured nearly £5m in pledges. This culminated in the Tech Career Connector brand, with a target of £15m to support 1000 people in the next year. Having only launched in May, TCC has already supported around 30 diverse individuals into meaningful employment in tech roles.
How has your project provided opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds?
The project is put in place solely to support people from disadvantaged backgrounds. QA’s main business function is apprenticeships and digital skills boot camps, however we want to widen participation into tech roles and support small businesses, who are the backbone of the economy.
Microsoft have already supported over 200 levy transfer requests to support SMEs and charities in their eco-system, including the likes of charities Catch 22 and Maximus.
ATOS supported us with empowering over 20 apprentices supported by Action for Autism and Leadership through Sport.
Accenture donated £500k of levy to support of a cohort of tech apprentices into SMEs from low economic areas across the West Midlands.
Amazon supported over 50 women into tech, both new entrants and reskillers and we placed them with SMEs across England.
We are currently working with MOJ on a cohort of prison leavers, as well as Phoenix Group for supporting workers over 50 into tech roles. We are supporting the black apprentice network with assessment days and inspiration days for aspiring black apprentices to receive career guidance from us and meet prospective employers.
What impact has your project had on your target audience?
We have been able to support the hardest to reach candidates and provide wrap around support from the country’s biggest organisations. Many small businesses lose out on talent to bigger brands, but it really helps when a large brand is on board to support. Apprenticeships have been criticised for giving middle classes an alternative route to university and that the less advantaged are missing out on these opportunities. This is why it is critical that a structured initiative is put in place to provide outreach and connections, and not just engage with underrepresented groups, but their communities as well.
Our contribution to the digital skills gap is high but we want to do even more. So far, 21% of our overall apprentices come from deprived postcodes which is higher than the 16% average, so creating an initiative that is dedicated solely to disadvantaged individuals will not only increase that number but we believe will change the face of tech diversity.
How will receiving this award benefit your project?
Receiving this award will help us to convince more levy paying organisations to pledge to supporting the fund, the only fund solely dedicated to increasing diversity in tech through levy share. We have made a commitment not only to support and help diverse individuals to thrive in the world of tech, but we also will be providing an impact report to all of our partners proving the impact that they’ve contributed to. We are working with charity partners to help us plug into as many communities as possible and we are all doing this in addition to our day jobs. Winning this award will help us with
the core reason we are doing the initiative and reach and smash the target of supporting 1000 diverse individuals into tech careers.
Please provide an endorsing statement from someone who can support this nomination (Max. 500 words)
For over sixty years, the British Safety Council has been a trusted guide to excellent health, safety, and environmental management.
As part of our charitable work, we lead health and safety networking forums for all sectors and promote best practice in Britain and overseas. We offer a range of services and products, including training, qualifications, publications, audits, and awards.
However, when it comes training our own people, a helping hand from others goes a long way.
We are a not-for-profit organisation and an Apprenticeship Levy Payer. However, due to our annual wage bill being just over the £3 million mark, and a sizeable portion of our work force being volunteers and some who are based outside the UK; the apprenticeship levy funds available to us for the purpose of staff development is proportionately low. Just over £3500 to be exact.
With the help of colleagues within the TAG team and the brilliant support from large levy paying brand LIDL, who recently pledged to support businesses through their own levy fund, we have been able secure levy funds to upskill 3 of our staff and support them on their career journeys.
This equates to around £61k in financial support, which would otherwise have been near impossible for us as a business to raise on our own.
As the business moves through the first phase of our two-year digital transformation journey, we are focusing on upskilling our existing IT team. QA and the TAG team have been incredible in supporting the work that the British Safety Council do, to ensure no members of our team are left behind. We are proud to endorse TAG for the Social Mobility Project of the year.
