The Kingsway Lesson
Kingsway Business Park was once heralded as a high-tech innovation hub for the North West — a destination for emerging technology companies and digital businesses. The ambition was real. The opportunity was real. But without a skilled local workforce pipeline to match, the vision didn't fully materialise. Today Kingsway is predominantly distribution units and vacant plots.
Atom Valley is a far more ambitious proposition — but the lesson from Kingsway is worth learning. Infrastructure and investment alone don't build a tech economy. People do.
The Skills Gap is the Real Risk
The industries moving into Atom Valley — advanced manufacturing, robotics, green energy, digital infrastructure — need people with specific, rare, technical skills. Electronics. Physical computing. Code that controls real things in the physical world.
Without a deliberate, sustained programme of digital skills training rooted in the communities around Atom Valley, those jobs will be filled by people from outside the region. The economic benefit flows elsewhere. Rochdale, Oldham and Bury provide the land and the logistics — but not the workforce.
That's not a criticism. It's a gap that can be filled. But only if we start now.
The Training Funnel
The journey from digital novice to tech sector employee doesn't happen overnight — but it does happen, reliably, when the pathway is properly designed.
It looks something like this:
🌱 Encounter
A community drop-in. A Digital Festival workshop. A Heritage Hackers session. Someone picks up a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino for the first time. Curiosity is sparked.
🔧 Engagement
Structured courses build on that curiosity. Electronics fundamentals. Coding basics. Physical computing projects. Real skills, hands-on, at a pace that works for the individual.
💡 Development
Deeper technical programmes. Project-based learning. Collaboration. Problem solving with real components in the real world — exactly the skills that advanced manufacturing employers need.
🚀 Employment
Apprenticeships, technical roles, careers in precisely the industries that Atom Valley is trying to grow. People from Rochdale, working in Rochdale, building things that matter.
This pipeline exists!
This is the pipeline. It exists. It works. Heritage Hackers has been running it informally for years — reaching people that traditional education never would, building confidence and capability one workshop at a time.
What's needed now is to formalise it, fund it, and scale it.
What We're Asking For
We've spent years telling the Work and Skills team at Rochdale Council the same thing: without regular, sustained digital skills training — with a clear goal of developing people who are proficient enough to work in the tech sector — Atom Valley risks repeating the Kingsway story.
The investment is coming. The jobs are coming. The infrastructure is being built.
The workforce pipeline needs to be built too — and it needs to start in the community, not the classroom.
