Google, Barclays, Lloyds Banking and BT have pledged to offer digital skills training to millions of people across the UK as part of the UK’s long-awaited Digital Strategy. Read more: Why the UK's Digital Strategy will ensure 'nobody is left behind'
Unveiled today by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) after a lengthy delay - the report, spelling out five years of digital agenda, was originally due in early 2016 - the Digital Strategy focuses on how the government plans on plugging skills and knowledge gaps across the country, leaning on big business to implement some of those measures.
In total, four million free digital skills training ‘opportunities’ will be offered, and these will come in a myriad of forms. Lloyds is providing the biggest commitment, promising face-to-face training for 2.5 million individuals, SMEs and charities by 2020. Details of what that training will entail had not yet been revealed at the time of writing, but the Lloyds course will include internet banking. The point of the Digital Strategy is not just to target younger generations with coding courses (though that is of course, part of it, with Barclays pledging to teach 45,000 children basic coding) but to ensure members of the public across all age groups can make use of online services that should make their lives easier, or get them better employment. And of course, the government hopes this will mean more people will ultimately use its own digital services.
- Read the full Digital Strategy documents here
Other commitments from industry include: Google’s Summer of Skills programme, which will be tailored for the tourism sector and taught in seaside towns; a Google engineering apprenticeship scheme; Barclays's pledge to help one million people learn general digital skills; BT’s Barefoot Computing Project, which will ensure teachers with no prior experience have the skills to teach 500,000 children to learn early computing skills by the end of the academic year; the HP Foundation's free platform HP Life, which will aim to help 6,000 people from disadvantaged groups within five years; and Accenture and FutureLearn's plan to create a new national digital skills programme designed to encourage online collaborative learning.
“We believe that digital can have a transformative impact, no matter where you live and what your job is,” Ronan Harris, Google MD for UK and Ireland, said in a press release. “We are delighted to be part of the Digital Skills Partnership and will continue to invest in the free skills training offered through the Digital Garage, launch a new programme aiming to help seaside communities, and - as a global first - are launching engineering apprenticeships, giving young people without a degree the opportunity to join Google’s world class software teams."
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Karen Bradley, added: “This Digital Strategy sets a path to make Britain the best place to start and grow a digital business, trial a new technology, or undertake advanced research as part of the Government’s plan to build a modern, dynamic and global trading nation. To do that, we will work closely with businesses and others to make sure the benefits and opportunities are spread across the country so nobody is left behind.”
Read more: Why the UK's Digital Strategy will ensure 'nobody is left behind'
Other elements of the Digital Strategy were announced earlier in the week, including an AI review to be led by the University of Southampton's computer science professor Wendy Hall and Jerome Pesenti from BenevolentAI. The UK is already working with homegrown leaders in the field like DeepMind, through its NHS pilot programme, and the government wants to tap into more partnerships with industry. £17.3 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has also been committed to boosting robotics and AI research at universities in the UK.
Other announcements include the upcoming launch of five international tech hubs based on the UK-Israel tech hub launched in 2012, which has led to partnerships between companies and deals totalling £62 million according to DCMS, and the launch of a Business Connectivity Forum aimed at helping companies access fast, cheap broadband.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
