Credits
2020 April 01: Idea conceived by Manoj Ranaweera of Techcelerate whilst having a chat with Anthony Chisnall, CEO of Techcelerate Tech Company Driver Net.
2020 Apr 02: At a meeting held to discuss the concept, Manoj invited Ram Raghavan, CEO of Techcelerate Tech Company Compaira, and Chris McCarthy, Managing Director of Techcelerate Partner, Focus 5 Recruitment to join to create Furloughed Life, a special project of Techcelerate Ltd. It was later decided to handover any profits made by the project to an NHS charity. Thomas Porteus, CEO of Techcelerate Tech Company Iatro Partners offered free hosting facilities for the project. Later on, Russell Groves, CEO of Techcelerate Tech Company, Training Sensei offered access to his e-learning product free of charge to Volunteers.
2020 Apri 20: Yogeeta Chirekhani joined to help with social media. During the tenure, she created many digital assets including posting them on Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook.
Others who later joined included:
- Bethan Weston – managing MailChimp
- Keith Merriman – Surveying volunteers and companies
- Michael Donaldson – Press coverage
- Nicolas Clarke – Engaging on behalf of Furloughed Life
Together we achieved the following results by 24th July 2020.
- 108 Volunteer signups
- 23 tech company signups
- 70 Opportunity postings
- 105 Volunteer Applications
- 35 Opportunity placements
- 8 Paying subscribers
As the majority of the volunteers were called back from their furloughed, a decision was taken to follow a different approach for the development of the next phase. Going forward, Manoj will work with a selection of specialists in their fields of expertise to build a cluster-based volunteer market place for tech startups.
Keith Merriman commented on his experience,
“Finding Furloughed.life has really helped me through a pretty difficult time – it’s kept me sane, given me a focus and sometimes just having some friendly faces to talk to each week has been invaluable – I’ll always be grateful for that, so thank you!”
Update: 27th Dec 2021
Manoj built SkilledUp Life and went live on 1st Aug 2020 by himself. In Nov 2020, Manoj hired Mithun as the first employee. It took 176 days to acquire 100 Volunteers. With the help of Volunteers, we reached 1,000 Volunteers by end of July 2020 at which point, SkilledUp Life Ltd was spun out from Techcelerate Ltd. Today, we have 2,702 Volunteers from 71 countries. We started to focus on building the demand side (companies) on 1st November 2021. We now have 9 paying customers.
In August 2021, we started to build Volunteer teams for ourselves, starting with the HR team. Elise Singleton kick-started this process. Whilst we are grateful to all volunteers who helped us, below is a list of individuals who provided exceptional help:
