What is the Tech Future Taskforce?
The Tech Future Taskforce is a collective of tech employers and organisations who are working together to improve socio-economic inclusion in tech. Tech Future is based on clear metrics, goals and a structured activity framework to deliver measurable progress. We are here to guide and support action amongst tech employers of all sizes, locations and industry verticals.
The tech sector is more elitist than Law and Finance. Just 9% of tech employees coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds, compared to 29% in Finance and 23% in Law and around 40% of the wider UK population. We want to create a future where people across the UK, irrespective of their socio-economic background, have the knowledge, inspiration and opportunity to convert tech career aspirations into tech career success.
By addressing socio-economic inclusion, we’ll help other areas of inclusion practice by engaging overlooked populations in our current and future tech talent pipeline, whilst also helping employers and investors to unlock diverse talent across the UK, enhancing market competitiveness.
Get involved in Tech Future - you'll be in good company!
Our four pillars of change
Tech Future is based on clear metrics, goals and a structured action framework to deliver measurable progress. In order to drive change in the tech sector, we ask employers in Tech Future to take action across four change pillars. You can use our Employer Activity Framework to guide your action across these pillars. You can also join our dedicated employer working groups to learn from other organisations and share ideas and solutions on how to improve on each pillar:
What you’ll do as a member of the Tech Future Taskforce
If you participate in Tech Future, we’ll ask you to choose a select pledges from a menu of options – you can see them in the section below. These options are some of the most impactful activities you can undertake to improve social mobility in tech. However, we have made our pledge system flexible so that you can tailor your actions to fit the specific circumstances of your employer strategy and internal policies. We will ask you to tell us about your activity against your pledges in our annual impact survey, which you can read more about in the adjacent sections.
We’ve created an Employer Activity Framework to help you drive social mobility in your organisation. As a participant of Tech Future, we will ask you to leverage the framework and take action on the areas you can. The framework can help you identify how to deliver on your pledges as well as giving you additional ideas on how to drive change. Each year we’ll ask you to share what you did from the Employer Activity Framework in our impact survey.
Every year we will ask you to tell us about your activities, results and learnings by completing an impact survey. This helps us measure progress against our core metrics and helps us learn together through the collective employer experience. We know that some organisations already conduct social mobility measurement exercises, so we have teamed up with the Social Mobility Foundation Index, so that what we ask you aligns with their questions too, saving you duplicated work. We are always keen to ensure our impact survey does not create a blocker to joining Tech Future, so our survey is designed to provide as much flexibility as possible.
Our working groups give you the opportunity to learn and explore ideas directly with other employers. Working groups are categorised under each of our four change pillars. They are a great way to involve employees from across your organisation, such as those who want to contribute time to a social mobility initiative through an employee network, ERG or charity work time allocation. The working group projects are shaped by their attendees, and the scope of the work can vary from quick projects (e.g. designing a resource on a particular topic) to longer projects. We have created a flexible approach where we organise and manage the working groups, to enable employers to focus on the solutions and outputs. We recommend allocating four hours per month for participation in a working group.
Options for action
Tech Future is for companies that have an earnest desire to making change, whether that's through employee networks, your HR or People function or at a strategic and systemic company level. Because we are action-focused, we ask our employers to choose four out of the six of the pledges below, with one of them being a charitable donation to the initiative and another being to identify a senior sponsor. You can choose the other commitments and we will help you deliver on them. We're set up in a way that gives you flexibility to work on the aspects of socio-economic diversity that make sense for your specific organisation.
Appoint a senior sponsor responsible for your Tech Future Taskforce participation commitments
Delivering tech career engagement activities to young people from low social mobility groups
Creating an inclusive culture where people from all socio-economic backgrounds thrive and progress
Helping you deliver through our community partners
The Tech Future Taskforce also is working with leading social mobility organisations to join up the effort between initiatives and develop a strong community of practice between industry, policy and non-profit activities. The Tech Future Taskforce is proud to already be working with:
Ready to get involved and find out more?
We're grateful for the support of these organisations, whose funding enables us to run Tech Future for the benefit of the wider tech ecosystem.
