Interview with Cameron Gordon, Business Development Executive at the Datalab

Do you want to start off telling me a little bit about the Datalab and what you’ve been talking to visitors about while you’ve been here at Offshore Europe?

The Datalab is one of the eight Innovation Centres set up and funded by the Scottish Funding Council. Our remit as the Datalab is data and AI so, we’re looking to develop skills and talent and then retain that skill and talent within Scotland. This is our first time at Offshore Europe so its been a really interesting week for us, we’ve been speaking to people about the collaborative projects that we do. We provide funding for industry to collaborate with academics, to push forward new ideas that they may not have the resource or the capability to do in-house. We’ve also been talking about our MSC placements, last year the Datalab sponsored 155 MSC placements in data science so, we’ve been speaking about getting these guys out into industry and having a bit more of a industrial experience. Its been good, its been well received, we haven’t had much contact with oil and gas initially, I’ve only been in the job two months so we’re just building that footprint out and looking to build a bit of awareness about the Datalab up here.

In terms of training and work placements within the energy industry, do you think we could still be doing more as an industry? Do you think there is more scope to be pushing that out?

Absolutely, especially in data science. The stat, because everyone loves a stat- if Scotland needs 13 thousand new people into the digital tech sector to stay standing still at the minute and what happens is, digital tech gets boosted as an industry in its own but actually, it touches everything. At the minute were speaking to a number of people in the Northeast about reskilling a really well-skilled workforce in the Northeast, highly educated, really got that analytical mindset into data science, that is something we are looking at. But also bringing that fresh talent and skill through from the universities and colleges in the area.

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