Our visit to North East England
We visit a range of leading businesses in the North East as we research our Best Practice Report on employment and training.
As the Jobs Foundation begins its research into best practice on hiring, training and retaining staff, we will be visiting many different places across the UK, looking into regions we didn’t have a chance to cover in 2024. One of them is Tyne and Wear.
CyberNorth is the cyber security cluster for the North East, an umbrella organisation for tech organisations to come together as a community, sharing insights, encouraging progressive collaboration and to help establish the region as a centre of excellence for the cyber security sector.
The Jobs Foundation headed up to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in early February to speak to various tech companies who are based in the area. Our first stop was a CyberNorth meeting, right in the heart of Newcastle, in an office just down the road from St James’ Park, home of Newcastle United FC. Discussed were key regulatory matters pertaining to the sector, important regional news, as well as the possibility of group trips to Dubai to ensure that the North East can make even more headway in the global tech market.
The following day we visited Accenture, a global professional services company that specialises in IT and management consulting. Its headquarters are in Dublin and in 2024, the company turned over almost $65 billion worldwide, with over 750,000 employees across the globe. Their office in Newcastle boasts an apprenticeship scheme that has been rolled out in other parts of the country after its success.
“It’s open to all ages,” said Nicola Japp, Security Delivery Manager at the company. “This will be people without a degree coming in, so we put them through our software engineering programme. They work at Accenture four days a week and are at Newcastle College one day a week.”
“Pretty much all of the cohort coming in are locally based. In terms of our apprenticeship engagement, we will go out to local schools, all around the North East.”
This highlights an important element of what companies like Accenture do – if we want two million jobs to be created across Britain, organisations focusing on the communities around them, hiring locally as much as possible, is crucial.
Not far away from Accenture is the second largest tech company in the United Kingdom, Sage. The company was created in Newcastle and is heavily imbedded in the community there. While running a great apprenticeship programme (and graduate scheme) themselves, Sage does a great deal beyond that in terms of building STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) skills locally.
“We run an event in St James’ Park every November for 1,200 Year Eight girls – specifically girls,” said Mads Howard MBE, Manager of the Chief Information Security Officers Office at Sage. “It is targeted towards girls wanting to study cyber security or technology more broadly. It involves employers from across the region – it’s the biggest STEM event focused on girls in the North East.”
Rounding out our visit, we met with Northumbrian Water, which supplies mains and sewage service to Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, Durham and parts of North Yorkshire. They are now running a huge programme called Joining Forces with Water which is focused on hiring veterans. It provides extra support for those transitioning from a career in the armed forced into civilian life. We will be talking to Northumbrian Water further about this scheme as we broaden our research out into how those who have served their country move into new careers.
There was so many interesting companies in the North East, the Jobs Foundation will be returning there in March for another visit. If you know of any great companies that might be right for our research, in the North East of England or elsewhere, please get in touch.
