The Digital Jobs Action Summit convened around a practical question: how can the people shaping digital work create clearer routes into the sector and respond to changing skills needs?
Held as part of Leeds Digital Festival in 2017, the event gathered people working across industry, learning, research and community initiatives. Its programme focused on the gap between available opportunity and the routes people can use to reach it.
This archive page preserves the summit’s central themes rather than its original event logistics. The discussion fed into wider work on a northern digital jobs strategy and highlighted the value of sustained collaboration across employers, educators and local networks.
The questions on the table
The summit was structured around four connected areas of inquiry. Each considered the relationship between the digital sector’s demand for skills and the systems that support people entering, progressing through and returning to work.
1. Understanding the challenge
Participants considered the barriers that can limit access to digital careers, including uneven awareness of roles, the quality of careers guidance, and the pace at which workplace needs change.
2. Looking at supply and demand together
The programme examined both sides of the issue: how people discover and prepare for digital work, and how organisations communicate opportunity, build inclusive recruitment practices and develop talent already in their teams.
3. Turning discussion into action
Rather than treating skills as a challenge for one institution to solve, the event explored shared action across local employers, educators, learners, researchers and public bodies.
4. Learning from working approaches
Case studies and comparative perspectives were used to test which smaller-scale interventions could be adapted, improved or supported over time.
What the event set out to include
- Research and local context on digital employment and skills challenges.
- Perspectives from people beginning careers as well as those hiring and developing teams.
- Working sessions to identify practical local action and longer-term policy considerations.
- Examples from other regions and programmes addressing access, learning and reskilling.
