Over 80 Nottingham business leaders joined the latest Nottingham Partners lunch on Friday 13th September. The lunch, which was themed around ‘Connectivity, 5G and Future Tech’, took place at Hilton Nottingham and was sponsored by Mason Infotech.
The attendees, including representatives from many of Nottingham’s leading businesses, enjoyed a networking session over a drinks reception before sitting down to lunch at one of Hilton’s largest meeting rooms.
Paul Southby, Chair of Marketing NG, welcomed guests to the venue, including new members, The University of Law and Champions (Uk) Plc, before inviting to the stage Stephen Mason, MD of Mason Infotech to introduce his company and give an overview on their latest developments.
Paul then took to the stage again and provided some updates on Nottingham’s developing partnerships across various sectors and congratulated Invest in Nottingham for scooping the Best for Business Support Services Award in the 2019 Midlands Enterprise Awards, before handing over to the first guest speaker Paul North – Head of Sales at City Fibre. As Head of Sales, Paul capitalises on his wealth of experience in working with IT service providers to help their customers understand the importance, benefit and simplicity of using dedicated connectivity to drive improvements in their commercial and operational performance. Paul took the guests through the history and showed them the future of Britain’s full fibre and explained why they should be adopting full fibre to shape the future of their businesses. He’s also given top tips to businesses who are looking into setting up full fibre for themselves already and encouraged attendees to direct any questions over to him after the event.
He then handed over to Andrew Bullock, Chief Technical Officer at UniDays, who spoke about the Tech 1000 initiative, which is a collaborative project between Nottingham City Council, various academic partners and local businesses to improve the digital economy in Nottingham.
Tech 1000 aims to deliver an additional 1000 digital opportunities by 2020; these will include providing local people with apprenticeships, work experience placements, graduate internships, and increasing the number of computing graduates choosing to stay in Nottingham after graduation. The strategy also aims to increase digital skills attainment in Nottingham by 35% in high-growth digital sectors, contributing even more to Nottingham’s growing reputation as a thriving digitally enabled economy and providing more jobs and prosperity for local people. Andrew encouraged businesses in the room to get involved and highlighted the benefits the project can bring them, before handing back to Paul Southby to close the event.
The next event is the Nottingham Partners Members’ Lunch on the 8th November 2019, which will be held at Trent Bridge. This lunch will be sponsored by Champions (UK) plc. The confirmed guest speakers include Adam Penford, Artistic Director at Nottingham Playhouse and Tristan Hessing of One Thoresby Street. Please click here to book your place. We look forward to seeing you there.
We have a great calendar of events lined up for the rest of 2019 and 2020, and there’s never been a better time to find out more about Nottingham’s premier business network. Contact Annette Thornley, our Commercial Partnerships Manager, for more information at annette.thornley@nottinghampartners.co.uk or 0115 962 8311.