Small and Medium Size Businesses Offered Free Support to Grow Their Digital Exports

Baroness Fairhead, Minister of State at the Department of International Trade, has announced a new partnership between the Exporting is GREAT campaign and Google, which will see the Digital Garage deliver an exporting education series for 2000 SMEs in 2019.

Focusing on helping businesses grow their digital export operation, the events will be hosted in Manchester, Edinburgh and on university campuses around the UK. The training will be split into three modules which focus on:

• finding new global opportunities, 
• setting up new export operations,
• and marketing.

Ronan Harris Google MD UK and Ireland said "We firmly believe everyone should be able to benefit from the opportunities that technology brings and we want to give people the skills they need to grow their confidence, career or business.

Looking forward to 2019, there is tremendous potential to envisage what we can achieve from working with the Department for International Trade to roll out a brand new training offering to small and medium enterprises providing valuable insight to support their export operations."

A recent Google business survey found that 70% of SMEs said that they lacked the skills needed to find the best overseas markets to enter.

The new partnership builds on an existing relationship which saw the Department for International Trade and Google working together to build a new online ‘Market Finder’ tool which allows companies to find overseas opportunities at the click of a mouse.