Our experience at The BIMA Digital Day 2022

The digital skills gap is a topic that has been widely discussed over the last decade, with the demand for digital skills continually rising but the skillsets of the employable population struggling to keep up. In fact, the World Economic Forum estimated that 54% of employees required reskilling in 2022, and in the UK 9 in 10 businesses admitted to having a shortage of digital skills. 

But to be totally honest, as a UX design agency, we didn’t necessarily recognise this as a real-life issue! When you work in digital, its easy to assume that everyone has these skills, especially when you consider that the younger generations are digital natives who don’t know a world without the internet! 

That’s why, when we were asked to join fellow indie agency Chime at the BIMA digital day back in October we were keen to get involved. Helping 65 twelve- to thirteen-year-olds to come up with an idea and design a digital product, how hard could it be?!

The BIMA Digital Day is the only initiative of its kind in the UK and gives 11–16-year-olds an insight into a world of digital careers. By going into schools and discussing what a role in digital actually is, the scheme allows kids to get to grips with ideas that will help shape the digital landscape. We helped the girls at Walthamstow Hall Girls School in Sevenoaks research, design and pitch digital products for well known brands Primark and The Royal Mail, encouraging them to act as an agency and develop ideas which supported the key objectives of each client, while experimenting with digital ideas to bring these to life. 

At Hancock & Rowe, we’re no strangers to digital design (if you have a UX project you need a hand with, hit us up!), but we were impressed with the way the girls went about wireframing their projects, designing web pages, apps and even digital display screens to illustrate how they would present their client stories to the world. 

We were particularly impressed with team ‘Awaken’ who ultimately were put forward as the best pitch of the day and entered into the BIMA national competition. The girls worked to design a digital campaign to help Primark demonstrate its ambitions to become a more sustainable and conscientious brand, using digital display screens to show where the materials for their products had come from, how the clothes could be styled and sized and the volume of CO2 produced from the creation of the clothes. 

We had a great time with the girls from Wally Hall, and were impressed with their enthusiasm for the project and their diligence in tackling the problems provided to them, but we were also surprised. 

We had assumed that digital skills would be ingrained in the young people we were working with, assumed that as everyone of them had a smart phone and a social media presence they would understand the importance of digital. And we were surprised that this wasn’t as obvious as we initially thought! While the girls had a great grasp of social media and knew how to navigate websites and the importance of using ads on these sites, the integration of digital into the real world was not as obvious as we had thought. 

We now see how important it is to continue to encourage young people to explore the world of digital outside of their “safe spaces”, to really get to grips with what digital means and help develop a passion for how we can improve and benefit society through digital skills. 

If you think you could help, registration for the BIMA Digital Day 2023 are now open. 

Huge thanks to BIMA for giving us the opportunity to get involved, to James Smith and all the girls at Walthamstow Hall school and to Chime for getting us along and pitching in!