Features / The surgery
Business Surgery: Develop Me
- Year established: October 2014
- Where the company is based: Easton
- Sector: Education & Media industries
- Number of staff: Four + network of freelance industry/trainers
- Owners: Oli Ward, Pete New, Al Kennedy and Helen Webber
- Key clients: Digital, design, marketing teams including BBC, Sift Digital, Mubaloo, The Agency, SearchStar, Imaginet.
About the business
Develop Me, a digital skills training company, was set up in October 2014 to provide companies and individuals access to commercially-relevant digital skills.
Digital has become such an important part of our day-to-day world, and yet the vast majority of people only interact with it as consumers, not really understanding how it works or how to utilise it in order to create and innovate. Develop Me are looking to change us all from passive users to empowered producers.
In the first six months since their launch, Develop Me have delivered a range of digital skills workshops attended by more than 150 people. These include sessions at the Bath Digital Festival, Digital Bristol Week and Bath Girl Geeks code clubs, along with a suite of bespoke training courses for Bristol, Bath and Cardiff-based agency web teams, independent developers and designers across the West of England.
Develop Me are currently in the process of rebranding and will be broadening their offering, with new courses focussed on corporate teams looking to update both their digital skillset and mindset. They are particularly excited about the development of a 20-week industry-endorsed digital apprenticeship programme.
Develop Me will also be announcing more single day and evening short courses and workshops for developers, including Design for Digital, User Experience, Social Media Marketing, Mobile App development and SEO courses.
Alongside these industry-relevant and commercially-focussed digital skills courses, the company is currently developing its social business ‘one-for-one’ model and community training programmes to support and deliver digital skills to people who are usually excluded access from this type of learning.
The Challenge
Every business is now a digital business. How can we engage and collaborate more with businesses to provide the digital skills training they need for the future?
FEEDBACK
Dan Read
Associate, Technology & IP, TLT
The future of digital business is about relevance and insight. To commit to the cost and time training involves, businesses want to understand the immediate benefits to their bottom line. Equally, all businesses must understand the skills needed for their digital future, albeit that corporates may be more than five years behind the technological “bleeding edge”. Innovative providers like Develop Me can provide relevant training for today and give an insight into a digital future that is currently out of a corporate’s line of sight. Anticipating that future can give competitive advantage but being too far ahead may switch them off.
Royston Seaward
Partner, Deloitte Digital
Develop Me has an interesting proposition here – delivering training that talks to all these points whilst being based in technical skills – as much about the mindset, behaviours and habits of digital as the technicalities of it. Perhaps the focus that will make the most difference is on empowering people running all types of business to have the confidence to experiment with their businesses and ideas to get the best out of digital. Giving people the confidence to ‘test and learn’ and ‘fail fast’ rather than feeling like they are betting the business.
Digital is all about connecting people and things; helping businesses, customers, and employees to interact in new ways, using exciting devices, experiences and platforms. The pace of change is very quick and accelerating which can be intimidating to many of us running businesses. The good news, though, is that at its heart its quite simple – well executed, people focused creative design is something that appeals to all of us and does good things for business results. With digital it can be achieved in small, easy to swallow chunks starting with the transactions that add the most value to your customers or employees. Uber, Apple, Netflix et al. demonstrate this.
Are you a business that could benefit from featuring in The Surgery? Email laura.collacott@bristol247.com