HackEd joins Cambridge Tech Week to support closing the soft-skills gap for the future of tech talent at The Bradfield Centre 16th - 18th September 2025.
- Hackathons have been noted to “positively impact participants' employability, entrepreneurial skills and appreciation of the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration” and are “a promising avenue for holistic, hands-on learning experiences”. ( Surendran et al, 2023)
- HackEd, a collaboration between Form the Future, The Bradfield Centre, Tech Educators and academic institutions and businesses will be a feature of Cambridge Tech Week, bringing over 100 students together to collaborate in small teams to build prototypes using a range of technologies to solve real world problems. Creating a learning experience that directly solves these soft skill needs, all under the Cambridge Tech Week agenda of “seizing the AI advantage”.
Businesses have long highlighted the importance of soft skills in the workplace, and whilst traditional academia continues to find new ways to innovate and embed those skills, nationally soft skills have been identified via the government's Local Skills Improvement Plan program, with Cambridgeshire and Peterborough’s LSIP highlighting a growing need for students to come to the workforce armed with experience of team-work, communication skills and the ability to solve problems.
Whilst academia continually looks for ways to improve the delivery of soft skills training, research has been following the positive impacts of immersive hackathons as a way to give situational learning that embeds such critical skills. Ensuring the future workforce is a focus for academia and business, research has noted its impact, and that collaboration has been the key to solving such problems.
HackEd has form in solving these problems, and bringing opportunities to individuals, at their previous event in Norwich, with a raft of positive impacts being noted by participants, and their education institutions, a staggering 82.8% of participants felt they would include the experience on their CV. 62.1% felt it encouraged them to start a job search in tech, and 20.7% felt it inspired them to pursue tech at University.
To enable students to deliver the best possible projects, Hackathon organiser Tech Educators will be running a series of workshops for participants to gain skills in key areas such as using AI in projects, accessing and using public datasets and designing user interfaces.
An event of this scale is only made possible through collaboration…. with support and mentorship from partners such as Quadmark and Salable.
James Parton, MD of The Bradfield Centre said:
"We are delighted to host HackEd as part of Cambridge Tech Week, which presents an exciting opportunity for participants to come together over three days to create, build, collaborate, and pitch. HackEd continues our partnership with Tech Educators, delivering real impact whilst aligning with our goal to help make the Cambridge Tech cluster accessible to all. Good luck to all the teams and have fun!"
All spaces for schools and colleges are currently allocated, but interested academic institutions can contact Tech Educators to register their interest should more spaces become available.
Attend the event final on the 18th September to watch the teams pitch and meet all of the participants.