UKCloud Announces Highest Ever Intake of Undergraduate Placements – With Similar Growth Planned in 2018

13th October 2017 – UKCloud, the easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to leave assured cloud services company, has announced it has this year seen a record intake of undergraduates in to its intern programme (16 in 2017 vs 7 in 2015) – which offers skills opportunities for placement students across key topic areas including marketing, technology and product development.

Building on this growth for 2018, UKCloud will be attending undergraduate fairs over the next two weeks as it seeks to increase this level of placement next year. In July, UKCloud also launched an apprenticeship programme in partnership with QA, the UK’s leading provider of professional training, with UKCloud’s first two apprentices already having joined the firm and a third post soon to be filled.

With its permanent workforce growing an impressive seventeen fold over the last five years, and a current total of almost 200 staff, UKCloud is particularly proud of its diversity. Age diversity is equitable across all employment age ranges, and gender diversity is well above the IT sector norm with an 80/20 male to female split. In addition, UKCloud has recently launched a Women in STEM campaign across marketing and recruitment, and its commercial director Nicky Stewart is among those shortlisted in the UK’s very first Women in IT awards.

Visiting UKCloud’s offices, local Aldershot MP, Leo Docherty commended the firm’s commitment to innovation, noting in particular UKCloud’s recent receipt of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise – the highest accolade for outstanding achievement in innovation.

“UKCloud is a fantastic success story for my constituency and for the UK as a whole, not only growing at an impressive rate by delivering a combination of innovation and service excellence to its public sector clients, but also acting as a champion for social responsibility,” commented Docherty. “In its support for public sector organisations and their initiatives to transform services, UKCloud is enabling them to do more for less, saving money for the public purse while driving improvements in public services. At the same time, it is creating numerous high value jobs in my constituency, with an admirable emphasis on diversity and skills.”

A member of the House of Commons Defence Committee, Docherty was also interested in how UKCloud is working closely with QinietiQ, which is also based on the Farnborough site that he visited today in his Aldershot constituency. UKCloud recently announced that it had been awarded a place on the innovative Technology Services 2 (TS2) framework across all of the TS2 lots: 1, 2, 3, 4a and 4b – Above Official. QinetiQ is a key UKCloud sub-contractor on TS2, bringing unparalleled knowledge and experience in working at Above Official on UK government projects and workloads.

“We were delighted to welcome Leo as our new constituency MP and to host him at UKCloud. We hope his visit will be just the start of a fruitful relationship with our local MP and look forward to continuing the dialogue around how government and industry can work together to further the progression of the UK technology sector and encourage the uptake of apprenticeships and undergraduate placements within the constituency and beyond,” said UKCloud CEO, Simon Hansford.