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We have had the dire media predictions, the dramatic bank collapses, stimulus packages, interest rate slashes, company failures, job losses, bankruptcies  and now the recession has become an established part of our lives. We are living with it. It no longer makes the front pages every day but for many people life is grim, with no sign of work on the horizon. For many others life is about to get that way, unemployment will reach three million no doubt before things start to improve. There are no new solutions. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the old ones. If you are job hunting you have to carry on, and in as positive a way as you can. (more…)

Something that all good career professionals notice, time and again, is a reluctance on the part of people who have been made redundant to take up the offer of outplacement services. What tends to happen is that an employer appoints Career Energy, or another outplacement consultancy, to to provide job search support services to a specified number of people whom they are making redundant. But the number who actually contact us to commence the service is always fewer than anticipated. Which is odd, given that there is no negative side to outplacement; it costs the employee nothing and can only increase and speed up their chances of getting a new job.

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Far be it from me to wantonly disagree with experts, but I have just read a review of a book by a group of New York academics, which, if the reviewer has conveyed it properly, cries out for criticism. The authors, professors of human resource management, argue that hiring and promoting people on the basis of past experience and past performance is not enough. Instead, companies would be better advised to plan more rigorously, identify where and when particular talents and skills will be needed, and then find, train and develop the right people for the right posts. Human resources requirements must be subordinated to strategy, they say.

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One of the first things to be cut when the recession hit was the corporate training budget. To most companies there seemed little point in investing in the future when it was so uncertain. And so at Career Energy we saw a surge in the number of trainers looking for work and a general sense amongst our clients that they were not buying anything. But that seems to be changing. (more…)

Yesterday’s announcement of a thousand job losses at the Daily Mail group, is the latest siren waren in the demise of regional newspapers. The decline has been accelerating for years and the industry is surely past the point of no return. But journalism remains a highly popular career choice, amongst both graduates and older career changers who enjoy and would like to write. And a stint on a regional newspaper was always the way to begin a journalism career. So if they disappear altogether, what will be the routes into the profession? (more…)

Writing in the Guardian on Saturday, Polly Toynbee suggests that the government should set up a job creation scheme to help reduce unemployment. An eminently sensible idea; it must surprise many people that it has not happened already. But it hasn’t happened, possibly because job creation is a complex and expensive activity that would be deployed across many agencies and public sector bodies, and no doubt the feeling in government is that fiscal stimulus is a quicker and easier way of rebooting the economy. Job creation is unlikely to happen. But there is a simpler and cheaper way of having the same effect.

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One of the striking things that career professionals notice is the number of young people in, or trying to get into, a career in film or broadcast media. The impression that this is a dream environment for so many is borne out by a visit to the BBC where the place is literally swarming with energetic, committed twenty and thirty year olds. But sadly there are far fewer media jobs than there are people to fill them, so getting a job is highly competitive and, for many, unachievable. Yet, with all this talent available, and with the UK economy in dire need of fresh impetus to drive it out of recession, are we being short sighted about the enthusiasm for media careers? (more…)

I spent much of yesterday travelling from BBC studio to studio discussing the new Career Energy book, How To Get A Job In A Recession. As I was being interviewed I heard a variety of stories about people who are struggling to find a job. Some people had real, almost intractable difficulties. And others seemed to be  creating excuses for themselves. (more…)

Our local Italian restaurant is closing this week, after over thirty years. No great surprise you might think, family-run Italian restaurants, once a permanent feature of the British high street have been disappearing for decades. But this closure is a direct result of the recession, if you had told Mario last summer that he would be gone within nine months he would have thought you were mad. So what does someone aged fifty, who has run their own business since the 1970s do now? (more…)

As we expected, the vast majority of people visiting our stand at the One Life Live exhibition this weekend were looking for new jobs. A significant proportion were already out of work and many more were expecting to face redundancy over the coming months. A recurring theme amongst the people that spoke to us was that they would like to take the opportunity offered by redundancy to move into a new career direction. (more…)