WECA | Digital Skills Investment Programme

The West of England has a growing digital sector and growing demand for specialist digital skills to drive recovery and growth, close the skills gap and fill vacancies.

The new £2M Digital Skills Investment Programme is a key part of West of England Combined Authority’s Recovery Plan.  The programme will support:

• Basic digital skills and access – to build capacity to increase access and take-up;

• Medium to high-level digital skills – to build on skills interventions and assets in the region to create a multi-partner approach to deliver short, innovative, bespoke training courses addressing digital skills gaps.

This Call is for medium to high-level skills.  Up to £1M is available to help organisations, sector representative groups, employers and/or and delivery partners in the West of England to address their specialist medium and high-level digital skills needs.

Background

Digital skills are becoming ever more important in today’s economy and are a near universal requirement for employment. The impact of COVID-19 has placed even greater emphasis on digital. In addition, the West of England Local Industrial Strategy highlights sector strengths for the region in:

• advanced engineering, including aerospace;

• creative, cultural and digital industries;

• financial, business and legal tech services;

• emerging sector strengths such as life sciences.

Digital skills in these sectors, alongside cross-sectoral digital skills requirements, are therefore likely to be especially important to the region’s recovery and growth.

The programme and how to apply

This Call of the Digital Skills Investment Programme is seeking applications from consortia who can work together to deliver creative approaches to address employer/sector ‘in demand’ digital skills in the West of England.  These can be employers, training providers, colleges, universities, sector representative groups and/or other community or charity organisations – there is no set formula.

Applicants can apply for between £50,000-£250,000.