Supporting DigiLeaders week

Last month Perago announced its involvement as partners of Digital Leaders Wales. As a company, we decided to be active partners and get involved and help with the programme as much as possible. This included giving some of my time to support Digital Leaders week that took place this week.

My Role

Digital Leaders Week consists of various organisations holding events discussing and promoting anything digital through the Digital Leaders platform. After meeting with the Digital Leaders HQ team, it was decided that I would be liaising with them along with Wales Co-op in order to make sure there’s enough promotion to Welsh companies as well as working behind the scenes to ensure smooth sailing through the Digital Leaders platform. I helped facilitate the week by working with the team twice a week until the end of the DigiLeaders Week.

Now that the week is over, I thought it was a fantastic opportunity as I was able to see how such a large, virtual event was facilitated and organised. Being involved in the behind the scenes work and the planning definitely helped me with my project management and event planning skills as I had to be organised and work effectively with others virtually, despite the lockdown restrictions.

Perago’s Involvement

As well as being sponsors, we got actively involved and held some sessions of our own all of which can be viewed on catch up. These sessions were:

Communicating Digital – Victoria Ford, Chris Elias

This session Victoria and Chris talked about how change will fail without comms, how to engage organisations with digital and how to work in the open. This session will included some hints and tips as they shared their experiences.

Digital Wellbeing – Chris Elias, Ben Dalton (E3i)

Perago teamed up with Cardiff based People Experts, E3i to bring this unique insight into the relationship between digital, digital transformation and the wellbeing of the people behind it all. Chris and Ben from E3i discussed how to use digital sustainably, explored some of the science that affects us when using digital tools and shared some tips that we can all do to ensure that digital makes our lives better.

Digital Talent – Tim Daley, Sunmi Babalola, Jess Neely, Ben Moxon

This session included an overview of challenges in Wales in terms of talent, what is shifting and why, how can we encourage/support more entry level jobs in digital and what we as Perago are doing to change that. The format was a facilitated conversation with a question-and-answer section.

As well as these, one of our directors, Dave sat on a panel for the DigiLeaders Wales Launch event on behalf of Perago and another one of our directors, Victoria chaired the Welsh Annual Lecture this year from Sam Hall, Chief Digital Officer for Local Government in Wales. We also supported Dwr Cymru Welsh Water on a session about smart technology and democratising automation.

My Experience

I really enjoyed watching the sessions my colleagues delivered, learning more about their work. I also took part in the session on digital talent along with three of my colleagues by telling my story of being a placement student and what I had learnt working in this space. I really enjoyed being in this session and being able to reflect upon my own experiences at Perago. At first I was a little nervous but I think the layout of the session being a facilitated conversation helped the session to flow easily and brought out great thoughts and ideas from everyone.

It’s been a brilliant experience working with the team to ensure an overall smooth, fantastic week as well as helping with promotion for the week, which I believe is what we’ve done!

To see any of our events, click the links to play them back.