Hack the North: Helping the region work and grow

Use your digital skills and creativity to help solve Manchester’s unemployment challenges, and further cement the city’s position as an international cultural and economic hub.

What to expect:

The event will be held across two days, from 4pm to 8pm on Thursday 23 November. We'll then start again from 9:30am to 6pm on Friday 24 November.

The challenge:

DWP Digital will be joined by some of the brightest and most creative people in the north to work on solutions which address one of the most pressing issues in the area. Despite Manchester’s growing popularity among top employers and its reputation as one of the UK's tech hubs, there are still more than 158,000 unemployed people in and around the city.

The challenge for our hack is to identify and address the barriers to people applying for these jobs, and develop an innovative solution to encourage people to retrain and travel to where the work is.

We believe it’s a great opportunity to generate ideas to help further cement Manchester’s place as an international cultural and economic hub, and we'd like to invite you to co-create solutions which could make a difference to this important cause.

Event format:

We'll kick things off on Thursday 23 November from 4pm, when we'll set the scene through some quick-fire presentations from a range of speakers.

Ideas will be then be pitched and teams will be formed who’ll then spend the whole day on Friday 24 November putting their ideas into practice before presenting these to our expert panel towards the end of the day. You’ll have access to searchable open-source labour market data to help bring your ideas to life.

Our developers, engineers and data science specialists will be on hand with advice and tips.

Food and refreshments will be provided by our sponsors. And like all good hack events, there’ll be a prize for the best solution!

Please note that the event will be filmed for promotional use.

What to bring:

Apart from yourself, you'll also need to bring your own laptops and chargers.

Please don't bring your own or your organisation's proprietary solutions to this event - we're looking for imaginative ideas on the day!
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