Tech entrepreneur invests a further £1m in North West academies to plug skills gaps

One of the UK’s leading challenger consulting firms, which specialises in large-scale business, technology and digital transformation, is investing a further £1m in its very own professional training and apprenticeships academies to create a Northern pipeline of talent to plug the UK’s professional skills gap crisis.

The S&A Transform Group (The S&A Group) which was founded in London by tech and business transformation entrepreneur Darren Coomer in 2010, formally launched The S&A Academy today and will be headquartered in Manchester’s Spinningfields business and tech district, as part of the Northern Tech and Science Powerhouse movement.

Coomer is no stranger to Manchester and the North West having spent much of his early tech career in the region. He went on to pioneer transformational CTO/CIO & COO roles in large financial services and insurance organisations such as LV= and the Co-op.

The S&A Academy will have three specialised academies: Technology & Digital, Science & Laboratory, and Business & Leadership. Each providing personalised professional training and apprenticeships as well as bespoke course creation and certification programmes for corporate clients.

The S&A Academy will play a pivotal role in providing a professional skills training and apprenticeship pipeline across Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Yorkshire and Lancashire as the Northern Powerhouse and the rest of the UK.

The decision to launch three apprenticeship training academies comes at a time when the UK faces its biggest ever shortage of professional skills talent in these sectors. The UK Digital Strategy 2022 estimates that the digital skills gap costs the UK economy £63 billion per year in gross domestic product and that this gap is expected to widen.

“Manchester and the northwest were the natural choice to headquarter the S&A Academy given our history of launching other businesses in the region. It was the world’s first industrial city and now Manchester is the driving force of the Northern Tech and Science Powerhouse,” said Coomer.

The S&A Group, along with its parent investment fund Moorfield Holdings, had previously invested over £1m founding another Manchester-based training provider, Credersi. They will now look to take their experiences of designing and delivering critical science, lab skills and tech training programmes, as well as expertise in business consulting to launch the S&A Academy.

The new S&A Academies will be curated by digital and technology transformation czar Darren Coomer, a highly experienced and gifted CTO and CIO with more than three decades of cutting-edge tech and business experience.

Coomer added: “We built the S&A Academy to provide a future-proofed industry relevant professional training and apprenticeship programme that is commercially in tune with the real world and not a purely academic-led syllabus. It has been developed using extensive knowledge, expertise and experience, as well as detailed client feedback from many years of delivering business and technology consulting.

“The recent closure of start-up growth network Tech Nation, which had incubated over a third of the UK’s tech unicorns, further reinforces the huge importance of developing our digital skills economy and workforces.”

By Mark Adair – Correspondent, Bdaily