Member Article

Basecamp Skills Secures £2M to Tackle England's Digital Skills Gap

Today sees The Department of Education (DfE) award a fast-growing regional training academy over £2M in funding to tackle England’s digital gap as part of the Skills For Life Bootcamp program. Basecamp Skills Academy, which has central locations in Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, will use the funding to launch its 12-week digital marketing bootcamps.  Already recruiting for their 6th Cohort, starting on the 9th of October 2023, it provides life-changing workplace skills to its students.

Basecamp Skills delivers fully-funded industry-led digital marketing training to help individuals over the age of 19 looking to upskill, retrain or kick-start a career in digital marketing. They promise every single learner access to a fully-funded training course, delivered by industry marketing professionals and secure a job interview should they wish to pursue a career in the sector. To date, it has already successfully enrolled over 200 learners across 7 cohorts, with 48% being from gender minorities and 48% from an ethnic minority background.

Uniquely the training scheme is linked to Fearless Adventures, a company which helps British digital startups grow with venture capital funding, staffing and digital marketing solutions. So it is  well placed to link the Basecamp Skills Academy students to businesses in need of their new skills. Set-up by Dominic McGregor, the former COO of digital business, Social Chain, with entrepreneurs David Newns and Charlie Yates, it started life in 2021 as The Fearless Academy before re-branding to Basecamp Skills Academy this year.

David Newns, Fearless Adventures and Basecamp co-founder said: “If you think about the sort of talent we’ll need in the next economic cycle, diversity of thought and opinion is absolutely essential. Widening talent searches beyond university degrees into work-based training, such as Basecamp Skills Academy’s best-in-class training, is a way to broaden that scope.”

Amy Wild, Basecamp Director, said “Our digital marketing bootcamp is simply different. We consistently enhance our curriculum to ensure that we are upskilling the next generation of ambitious talent with the skills desperately needed by the industry. Every life we positively impact cements our mission and we are on track to upskill 1,000 individuals by 2025.”

Emily Moffat, Head of Talent, said: “Basecamp Talent was born out of the need for a genuine talent service, offering trust, transparency and support. After speaking to over 1000 founder-led businesses, there was an obvious recurring problem; hiring and retaining the right people. It was clear that after spending time sourcing best-in-class people for our investment portfolio, we should extend our services to the wider business ecosystem.”

Dominic McGregor, Fearless Adventures and Basecamp co-founder said: We launched The Fearless Academy with the aim of bridging the digital skills gap. With this rebrand, we are confident that it will enable us to further pursue our mission and scale our efforts in creating an inclusive environment, accessible to everyone seeking to acquire essential digital skills.“

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rob McDonald .