A local report on our sector… and your thoughts on the “Digital Summit”
By Sarah Cronk
A big thank you to all who attended our first "Chalk Eastbourne Presents" event last week! We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Thank you to our speaker Russ Miles, to Foundry for use of the venue, and Locate East Sussex for sponsoring our drinks reception.
📣 As planning for our big "Digital Summit" in Eastbourne next year is underway, we'd love to hear your feedback on last week's event and what you'd like to see in future (whether you attended this one or not). Please fill in our short questionnaire to help guide us.
Eastbourne Business Awards - Congratulations!
Eleven companies were named finalists in the creative and digital category of the Eastbourne Business Awards, which we think represents all of the fantastic work going on in our town.
We'd like to say a big congratulations to the category's award winners, Southern IT Networks Ltd, and to Cloud, Voice & Data received highly commended status. We hope to catch up with both companies in future newsletters to give you more insight into what they offer.
Other winners from our sector included Pearce Marketing as Best SME Business and Lightning Fibre as Best Large Business. Well done to all finalists and winners who attended the awards ceremony on 30th September at the Winter Gardens.
Pictured above are some of our team of finalists from Switchplane and Chalk Eastbourne.
Understanding the Creative, Digital & Techology Sector in East Sussex
Investigations into our sector have been undertaken this year by Wired Sussex, commissioned by Locate East Sussex, and the findings are out now. Phil Jones and Josh Siepel's report explores the Creative, Digital and Technology (CDT) sector in East Sussex, identifying areas of activity and opportunities for growth and future investment.
We're really pleased that this report acknowledges the dominance of larger IT/software businesses here in Eastbourne. It reflects many of the common challenges we face in attracting more engineering talent and developing routes into programming and software development careers locally.
We will do what we can as Chalk Eastbourne to support the report's recommendations.
A Chat With: Software engineer, author and speaker Russ Miles
Russ Miles may be now be a familiar face to Chalk Eastbourne, having been the star of our event last week. We wanted to share his inspiring stories with you, so we caught up with him to find out more about his career path and experiences working in the UK, the US and Dubai - as well as his return to a great work-life balance in Eastbourne.
In our interview, we found out...
💻 ...how Russ ended up working in Silicon Valley
🌤 ...why his outlook on life changed
👂 ...what the most valuable time of his week is
👨👩👧👦 ...what Russ looks for when he hires
Read the full interview for all this and more!
One last thing...
What will your Eastbourne adventure be? We wanted to share with you this fantastic video from Visit Eastbourne, Eastbourne Hospitality Association and PRG Ltd showcasing many of the wonderful activities that it's possible to get involved in locally.
They say a picture says 1000 words - well, this video says it all!
