CAN CLOUD-BASED BUSINESSES TRANSFORM RURAL ECONOMIES?

The Staffordshire/Derbyshire border village of Longnor is very typical of its kind. Every day, the children of families who have been settled here for generations are growing up, seeking work, getting married and moving away to commercial centres where jobs are more plentiful and property is cheaper. And every day, the residual population of Longnor is growing older and greyer. Children cannot afford to buy properties in the same village as their parents these days. Jobs are scarce and unless you happen to be born the child of a farmer, there is very little chance of your being able to settle in the place you grew up in. Rural communities are being fragmented bit by bit. The only people who can afford to live in the countryside these days are affluent commuters or retirees. The migration of the young from the country into the surrounding towns and cities is often lamented in both local and national newspapers, but nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. However, a start-up translations agency based in the village may have the answer.

Technical Translations was set up in the shadow of the recent recession in the autumn of 2009 by a local entrepreneur, Ben Wyatt. Ben realised that if he were to get a step ahead of the not inconsiderable competition in the field, he had to do some creative thinking to reduce costs to the end user, and with this in partly mind, he decided to move away from the restriction of expensive office overheads and utilise a home-based project management team working communicating with suppliers and clients alike via the Internet.

www.technical-translations.co.uk utilises a cloud-based project management application, which can be accessed at any time and from anywhere by anyone with an Internet connection. Project files can be shared with colleagues, contacts, clients and suppliers in any part of the world, and clients can view the progress of their projects in real time so there is no fear of missed deadlines. Project managers can work from home and around other commitments. Some of our project managers and translators are working mums, and many live in villages or the remote homesteads of the local area.

Melandra Smith is Technical Translations Senior Project Manager and lives in a Peak District village where she works from home. Her husband’s family have been in the village for over 7 generations and she grew up in the remote Staffordshire Moorlands not 8 miles away. For Melandra, a CIM trained marketer, copywriter and illustrator, the idea of moving into a big city to look for work was a complete anathema.

“Not everyone wants to work in the city. And there just isn’t enough variety of jobs available in rural areas to support a professional or academic workforce. Working in the language industry from home suits me down to the ground,” says Melandra. “I have two children, 3 years and 8 months old, and they are going to grow up living in the countryside just as I did. I am very glad to have the opportunity of working for a very forward-thinking company. I cannot understand why more businesses do not run cloud-based operations. There must be a resource of potentially thousands of skilled workers out there companies of all kinds could tap into to reduce their own overheads - and perhaps if there were more and better homeworking opportunities available to them, the up and coming rural graduate workforce wouldn’t feel that they had to go chasing a job in towns or cities.”

Research by Virgin Media Business has turned up an enormous disparity in the views held by employers as against workers when it comes to the adoption of cloud services in the workplace, with six in ten workers in favour of having access to cloud services while only one in ten companies currently utilise them.

Melandra continues: “There is a serious lack of faith in the principle of cloud-based employees and a change of mind will probably take time, especially with more traditionally focussed businesses. However, Technical Translations have found workers to be happier and more productive since we started to operate our cloud-based system, and it is a decision we are very pleased to have made.”

http://www.technical-translations.co.uk is a specialist provider of technical translations in every industrial field, from aerospace to automobiles, from medicine to military, and have many years of experience in every aspect of managing translation projects both large and small. Our crack team of handpicked, experienced and highly qualified translators operates globally, 24 hours a day.

Melandra Smith, Marketing and PR, Technical Translations from Centuries Limited
The Old Vicarage, Buxton Road, Longnor, Buxton, SK17 0NZ, UK
melandra@centuries-limited.co.uk
www.technical-translations.co.uk

This release was published on openPR.