I only know that you may lie
Day-long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester . . .
I've always liked Bloomsbury. Perhaps it is the nice yellow Cambridge brick in Kings Cross Station, now complete with platform 9 3/4 direct to Hogwarts, and in the world's first underground line that runs under the Euston Road West to Baker Street and down to Barbican. So it was a great pleasure that East of England Development Agency asked us to present alongside them at a Human Resources conference yesterday.
As Rupert Brooke noted in the poem above, it is pretty sweaty in the big City when we get nice weather. Cycling from Kings Cross was a lot more pleasant than taking the train to it. Passing through Soho and Pall Mall, I dropped in with some people interested in engaging with Cambridge largely because of its amazing reputation for developing strong businesses. A band discovery company that have already added 35,000 users, surfaced 1,800 new bands, and are now the exclusive channel surfacing new music for 12 million Sony Playstations. We talked about the role that bands play in social media as "dummy" friends around which people can socialise, and the influence social media now has on branding. As I waited between meetings, I caught up with e-mail and phone calls in the bright sunlit streets. A lady who had applied to help us out with Membership Liaison after being made redundant from her Sales job had lined up half a dozen new options - but now her husband had lost his Sales job too, so they were selling up and travelling the world. And I met a London angel with a strong technology track record with local London businesses keen to invest here. She turned out to personally know most of the angels, but somehow not to have engaged with the startups because she hasn't been to events here.
My heart rather sank as I entered the air-conditioned hulk of the conference centre. A lot of very senior HR managers from great organizations including BT, NHS, Thomson Reuters, the UK Border Agency and many more were learning about how to deal with migrant workers. The lady from BT gave a brilliant presentation on how to operate the points system, what happens when you get a rush inspection and generally how to be humane to your staff while respecting the law. NCP Services were very amusing on the professionalism needed to deal with the Press when the company that you have taken over turns out to have 50% illegal workers. But as the ex-Metropolitan Police speaker just before us reminded everyone, a false identity means that you have simply no idea who is gaining access to your company's records. Getting it wrong seems to be quite bad news all round. And outside there was the beckoning sunlight, the train home and real life - and only my friend in charge of migrant workers for EEDA and my own pitch for Cambridge Network between them and escape. As far as these conference goers were concerned, they were tired of London and it would take more than a philosophical argument to persuade them otherwise.
Fortunately we had good news for them. Migrant workers like Hermann Hauser (Austrian), Pamela Raspe (New Zealander) and Andy Hopper (Polish) have generated many local companies over the years, including second-generation companies like ARM. ARM now employs 46 nationalities, 40% non white and just 30% British. Those migrant workers are bringing a lot of cash into our economy, given that the great majority of their turnover is export to all those partners who helped them ship 10 billion microchips over the years. And there are lots and lots more vacancies which will require still further skilled workers, 50% of whom are likely to be migrants. The EEDA chap chipped in with great stories of businesses repairing telephones in Norfolk importing East European skilled technicians after finding that no regional universities were training people with the relevant skills. For all of these great companies, the 16,700+ users of Cambridge Network around the world who have registered to receive jobs and news bulletins weekly are an opportunity to fill those vacancies and grow faster. The training provided by The Learning Collaboration helps them develop and retain those staff as they move into senior management. And for EEDA (who helped fund the The Learning Collaboration for the first few years) it is nice to see many skilled migrant workers staying in the region and building our economy so local people find more work.
The conference organizer chairing the panel was flatly incredulous. Job vacancies are dropping at record speed! British jobs should be for British workers!! Apparently he had been reading the popular press. Fortunately the audience came to our rescue. Actually they all had large skill shortages in engineering and research. Faced with the unpalateable choices of off-shoring entire areas of their business or dealing with large amounts of government red-tape, they were doing the latter and paying taxes here in the UK. So they could quite understand why such a pre-eminent research technopole should need lots of migrant workers and be happy to have them sign up on a community website. And why a cluster with such strong skills should be growing in the middle of a recession.
On the train back I ran into a nice chap who started a
business after finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge 10 years ago. We
caught up on the missing years, in which he has built up a blue-chip
client base and employs 30 people. Now he needs to hire 30
more. He's not from the UK - but I feel jolly glad that he decided to build his business here in
collaboration with a local academic.
Cambridge ideas change the world - irrespective of the nation, sex, colour or creed of the person who happens to be thinking them.
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