Ready to re-write the rules of leadership?
Join our 10-week, funded careers bootcamp for Brighton-based leaders and aspiring leaders. Designed in partnership with innovative leadership experts, Be More Pirate, you'll learn new skills and frameworks, and build and execute a practical plan for the next step in your career.
Built for Brighton. A Different Kind of Leadership Programme
Most leaders rarely get the time to reflect on their leadership style, approach and practice. Many managers work within structures where they find it difficult to influence or make change. If you are an aspiring leader, you often learn on the job, with little in the way of preparation before you apply for a management role.
This programme gives you the space, and a new language, to see leadership through a new lens. This isn't leadership theory from a textbook: our bootcamp, in partnership with Be More Pirate, is built for the thriving, creative, purposeful and ambitious city that Brighton is, often made up of small teams, creative agencies, social enterprises, independent hospitality and digital. Real contexts, real decisions, real stakes.
Through this 10-week programme we aim to bring a different perspective to leadership: the conviction to challenge the status quo, think differently, and write new rules for yourself, your team and your organisation.
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Who it's for
Our bootcamp is one of the few programmes that invites business owners, freelancers, employees and jobseekers to join the party. We welcome people from any sector and any level of leadership. Our only stipulation is that you're a resident of Brighton & Hove.
You might be:
What you'll learn
How the ten weeks work
Every week you'll have one full-day workshop together in Brighton city centre, working on a different element of leadership. Non-accredited, 60+ guided learning hours, no exam, evidence of progress instead. Two real projects anchor the journey: the first half builds your plan, the second half is the proof you're executing it.
The two projects
What you'll walk away with
- ☠A real, professional plan for your next leadership step.
- ☠Evidence you've already started executing it.
- ☠Genuine insight into how you lead, and where to sharpen, grown through fun, reflective missions and mutinies.
- ☠A real leadership outcome targeted within six months: a promotion, new responsibilities, new contracts, a first hire, or a leadership role.
- ☠A cohort that becomes a crew: connections, and up to six months of support after you finish.
Getting you paid work is our whole mission.
Every week includes a dedicated Opportunity Lab session, and it carries on for up to six months after you finish.
The Opportunity Lab is part of the programme and we expect you to attend. If the timing is difficult, for example because you are in work, talk to us and we will work around it where we can.
See how careers support works →Why we've partnered with Be More Pirate
We believe that for things to genuinely change, they have to be done differently. Good leadership isn't about managing the status quo a little more efficiently, it's about having the conviction to question what you've inherited and the skill to build something better in its place.
That's why we've teamed up with Be More Pirate. This bootcamp is for people who want to lead with conviction, creativity and integrity, to do right by their teams, hold their nerve under pressure, and use their position to drive real change in their organisation, their sector or their city. Be More Pirate brings a different lens to leadership and the practical tools to act on it; we bring the structure, the funding and the careers support to turn it into your next step.
About Be More Pirate
Be More Pirate began as a book, Sam Conniff's 2018 bestseller Be More Pirate: Or How to Take on the World and Win, and grew into a global movement. It reframes the Golden Age of Pirates not as chaos but as one of history's great case studies in leadership and social innovation: collaborative crews who rewrote the rules, shared power and paid fairly, and built accountable, democratic ways of working a century before mainstream business caught up.
Alex Barker, formerly of the RSA, with a decade spent supporting social entrepreneurs, now leads the movement and runs Be More Pirate workshops and training programmes. The approach has sparked innovation inside major organisations including Salesforce, Mercedes, LEGO, Google and the NHS, and just as readily with the founders, freelancers and small businesses that make up the backbone of a city like Brighton. Alex is co-author of the sequel book How to Be More Pirate, which documents case studies and stories of piracy in practice.
Hear from our learners
From our Winter 2025 showcase event, across all our bootcamps. Clips load on click.
Who can apply
You'll need to be 19 or over, a Brighton & Hove resident, and have the right to work in the UK. It's open to emerging leaders and experienced ones alike, employed (co-funded), self-employed or out of work.
Live in East Sussex? Your funded equivalent is the Business Management bootcamp.Fully funded for eligible Brighton & Hove residents
This training is worth over £2,500, and it is fully funded for eligible Brighton & Hove residents. If you are out of work or self-employed and meet the criteria, your place is fully funded and you pay nothing.
Eligibility confirmed at application.
Check your eligibility
This course is fully funded for eligible Brighton & Hove residents. Answer two quick questions to check.
This is a quick guide. Eligibility is always confirmed at application.
Register your interest and start your application now.
Applications are still open for our new cohort starting 5 October 2026. Register your interest and start your application today.