Week Starting 26th January

Charitable Volunteering Falling

The amount of time spent on charitable volunteering in the UK fell by 30% between 1995 and 2000. Over this period the number of volunteer hours dropped from 2.3 to 1.6 billion hours according to a recently published report from the Office of National Statistics

Is this fall off a sign that people are becoming more selfish and less inclined to volunteer? The ONS thinks it could be a direct result of rising levels of employment. However, according to the National Centre for Volunteering (NCV) it reflects a change in the type of volunteering that is going on, “Many people now do voluntary work at a local and individual level, such as in their school, but they do not see it as voluntary work and it does not get registered as such in official figures.”

Community Service Volunteers (CSV) elaborate on this theme, “Volunteering is certainly changing. Instead of long-term commitment working professionals are looking for one-off volunteering. They want to be able to turn up, do their stuff and go home without the guilt of failing to carry out a long term commitment.”

Jobcentre Plus advisers are trying to interest jobseekers on New Deal 50+ in charitable volunteering as a portal into paid employment and have linked up with the Experience Corps to do this.

Meanwhile, the future of the Experience Corps itself remains in doubt. The Government’s block grant to this special organisation, set up to help boost volunteering by the over 50s, ends in March. Only time will tell whether it has been successful in finding enough alternative funding to carry on.

Manufacturing’s Seven Lean Years Over

According to the CBI’s latest quarterly industrial trends survey, the UK’s manufacturing sector has just had its strongest growth in orders for seven years and the strongest growth in output for over eight years. Confidence is up and firms are predicting strong growth over the next 3 months.

Companies are planning to increase investment in plant and machinery for the first time in six years and are also planning to spend more on training and product and process innovation.

Even though the survey shows the smallest fall in employment for almost 3 years, more jobs are expected to be lost over the next quarter and two thirds of firms continue to work below capacity.

Home Computer Initiative Launched

The Government has launched the Home Computer Initiative. Under the scheme, businesses can claim back tax on the cost of computers purchased to allow employees to work from home.

In a recent NOP survey nearly three quarters of the employers questioned said their organisations would benefit from a scheme to loan computing equipment to their employees for home use. Over 60% of employees with home computers believed their IT skills had improved as a result.

The Government hopes the new scheme will help solve the UK’s present IT skills
shortages. It should also give a boost to flexibility and better work/life balance by encouraging a higher level of home working.

Week Starting 19th January

Online Recruitment Paradox

It is something of a paradox that at a time when many employers have become disenchanted with, and rowed back from, advertising their vacancies online (see item below) that more and more jobseekers are turning to the internet to try and find a job.

According to a new survey carried out for Reed Employment, the number of people looking for a job online has doubled over the past 3 years and nearly 10% of all jobseekers have found a job online over the past 3 years. Nearly quarter of respondents said that it was their favourite route to finding a new job.

The challenge for employers in a tightening labour market is how to use online recruitment effectively – both as a way of improving the cost-effectiveness of their recruitment activities and to ensure that they reach the quality of candidates they are looking for. And to do this without being inundated with applications from unsuitable candidates.

Recruiters Increasingly Turning To Testing.

Although most employers still favour face-to-face interviews as the best way of finding new employees, more and more are also turning to various means of testing to help make their decisions. These include the use of assessment centres, competency based interviews, personality and psychometric testing.

Applicants for ICT jobs are the most likely to face a battery of various tests to ensure they have the right skills

When it comes to hiring managers nearly 25% of employers in a recent survey use assessment centres to help them, whilst the average using them for other positions within their organisations was 7.5%.

Older job applicants in particular can be easily intimidated and wrong-footed by being asked to undertake such testing. It is always a good idea to ask ahead of a job interview about the form it will take, forewarned is some way to being forearmed.

EU Funding Cuts Will Lead To UK Job Losses

The forthcoming enlargement of the EU will lead to job losses and economic stagnation in many of Britain’s regions because of a huge switch of development funding to the poorer Eastern European countries joining in May.

Britain’s regions are likely to lose a third of the £7 billion EU development funding they will have received between 2000 and 2006 in the next funding round that will run from 2006 to 2013. The funding is used to improve infrastructure and help businesses.

According to the English Regions Network the reduction will have a huge impact – on jobs, on the number of people trained and the number of roads built. Some regions are bracing themselves for a drop of up to 80% in their development budgets. Merseyside, West Wales, South Yorkshire, Scotland and Yorkshire and Humberside are amongst those likely to be hardest hit.

Both Jobcentre Plus and the Learning & Skills Council rely on European Social Fund (ESF) money to help finance many of their programmes and many voluntary organisations (including many of TAEN’s members) are forced to rely on ESF funding to pay for the services they provide.

Although some transitional relief is likely to be negotiated, the Government accepts that British regions will lose 50% of their Objective 1 funding and a third of all other funding, after 2006.

Week Starting 12th January

Internet Recruitment Falling Out Of Favour

An increasing number of employers seem to be abandoning internet recruitment for their job vacancies. Whilst 1 in 3 recruiters used the internet to recruit in 2001, last year the figure dropped to 1 in 20 according to a new survey from IT consultancy Parity.

The reasons given are the huge volume of responses that online job vacancies attract – recruiters say they can’t handle the volume and are swamped with unsuitable CVs.

Conventional forms of recruitment advertising bring a more manageable and higher quality response – allegedly.

Lowest Unemployment For Nearly 30 years

Against the background of a string of announcements on job losses from major companies such as Boots, Axa Insurance, Samsung and Abbey, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has published the latest employment figures. Unemployment in December was at its lowest since 1975.

There were 28.15 million people in work over the last 3 months – equivalent to an overall employment rate of 74.6%. Employment is up 41,000 over the past quarter and 186,000 up on the same period last year.

The number claiming Jobseeker Allowance fell by 8,000 last month and stands at 908,000 which is 27,000 lower than in December 2002. The Government’s preferred ILO unemployment measure (which estimates active jobseekers as well as JSA claimants) for last month was 1.46 million, down by 29,000 on December 2002.

The number of long-term unemployed (people who have been unemployed for a year or
more) has fallen to below 150,000. Six years ago the figure stood at over 500,000.

The ONS and Jobcentre Plus both report the number of unfilled vacancies is up over the last year and in the 3 months to December stood at 616,000.

Population Ageing No Threat To UK Prosperity

An important new report published by the House of Lords Economics Affairs Committee concludes that population ageing does not pose a threat to the continued growth and prosperity of the UK economy. It is just one of nearly 50 conclusions and recommendations the Committee has come up with following its inquiry into age discrimination, pensions policy, labour supply and retirement age.

The Committee concluded that there is a significant degree of age discrimination in employment in the UK and that it occurs throughout the economy - in both private and public sectors.

Some of the other key conclusions and recommendations contained in the ‘Aspects of the Economics of An Ageing Population’ report are :-

• Manipulating immigration policy is neither a feasible or appropriate way to attempt to counter the trend to a more aged society.
• The Government should incorporate explicit employment rate targets for older workers in their Regional Economic Strategies and in the priorities they set for the Regional Development Agencies.
• Ageism in public appointments should be brought to an end and there should be an explicit commitment to age diversity in public appointments made by the Government and all sponsoring Departments.
• The upper age limit on all public sector employment should be removed before the implementation of the age discrimination legislation.
• Government and employers should work together to develop mechanisms to promote equal access to workplace training and life-long learning for workers regardless of age.
• The upper age limit of 55 on student loans should be removed.
• Employers should not be able to impose normal retirement ages on their employees unless they can justify them. Employees should be able to continue working as long as their employer is happy to let them to.
• The Government should raise state pension age and review it every 5 years in the light of life expectancy beyond 65 and in the light of its desire to increase the employment rate of older people.
• The basic state pension should be paid on the basis of citizenship rather than National Insurance contribution record and that there should be less reliance on means-tested benefits.
• The Government should consider phasing out over time the tax-free lump sum individuals can draw down from personal or occupational pensions.

Air Crew Take British Airways To Tribunal Over Age Discrimination

Seventy pilots and cabin crew have taken BA to an employment tribunal claiming that its retirement age of 55 is discriminatory. The air crew want BA’s retirement age to be extended to 60 in line with many other airlines in UK and abroad.

Presently any pilots or cabin crew employed by BA after 1971 have to retire at 55, whilst those employed before 1971 can retire at 60.

Experts think that BA are likely to win the case because age discrimination is not currently illegal in the UK. Even when the legislation comes into effect in October 2006 it won’t be retrospective and employers will still be able to put forward justifiable exceptions.

Week Starting 5th January

Employment Predicted To Rise By 1% This Year

On the back of improving business confidence in the UK, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is predicting employment levels will rise by 250,000 this year – equivalent to an increase of just under 1%.

The CIPD’s predictions of an improving job market are borne out by the latest monthly Report on Jobs from the REC/Deloitte and Touche. It shows that demand for permanent staff through employment agencies has reached a 41 month high and that the availability of skilled workers is becoming an increasing problem, which is helping to fuel salary growth.

The CIPD says that this level of new job creation will create huge dilemmas for employers – many of whom are already struggling to fill existing vacancies - so it is advising UK organisations to tap into under-used sources of labour such as older workers, lone parents, disabled people, ethnic minorities and immigrants.

HR Professionals Largely Unaware of Latest Discrimination Legislation

A survey published this week shows that under a third of the HR managers or executives surveyed had heard of the new legislation outlawing discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, religion or belief. The legislation came into effect at the start of December 2003.

The survey was conducted with 239 HR managers and executives across the Civil Service and private sector by the Fuel Group and supports the findings of other recent surveys. The findings are worrying to say the least because these are the professionals whose job it is to run and manage Human Resource/Personnel Departments and it seems to reflect the lack of training they appear to have received on the subject. The survey found that only 15% of the private sector HR respondents had received any general diversity training and only 9% had received any legislation specific training. Even so, you would have thought that they would read about it in newspapers or their professional journals.

The lack of awareness means the legislation is unlikely to be implemented properly, so that those who should be protected by it won’t be. It is therefore likely to prove expensive for employers. The new legislation gives tribunals the power to impose unlimited fines and The Equal Opportunities Review only recently highlighted that tribunal payouts for discrimination had increased to just under £6.5 million – representing a rise of 65% in the past year.

Not surprisingly the Government is being urged to ensure this lack of awareness is rectified although they might well reply that it is the responsibility of employers to
ensure their personnel – especially those who are charged with running the organisation’s personnel activities - receive the appropriate information and training.

Employers were only given a few months to prepare for the detailed regulations outlawing these two new strands of discrimination legislation, they should have nearly two years to prepare for those which will outlaw age discrimination. However, the smart ones aren’t waiting, they already have ‘age-proofed’ their policies and practices or are doing so….

Ageism Growing Says Minister

Malcolm Wicks, Minister for Pensions, says that ageism has been growing amongst UK employers at the same time that demographic change means there are fewer younger and more older people of working age. What’s more ageism makes no business sense.

In an interview with Personnel Today, the Minister says that he doesn’t think employers are doing enough to tackle the problem – despite examples of good practice being set by a number of employer ‘frontrunners’ and the best efforts of the Government’s own Age Positive campaign . It is right to introduce legislation outlawing age discrimination, he says, because it can be as devastating as racial or sexual discrimination. But the Minister believes the most powerful driver for changing employer attitudes and improving social inclusion will be full employment because it will force them to become ‘more grown-up about employing older workers, ethnic minorities and disabled people’.

Mr Wicks says a debate is needed on the nature of work in later life and that we need to concentrate on lifelong learning so that people can re-skill and re-equip regardless of age.

Too Young At 35, Too Old at 40

By coincidence the interview with Malcolm Wicks (see item above) has been published the same week that the CIPD has released a report claiming that only those aged 35-40 are considered neither too young or too old for the jobs they’re applying for.

The report re-iterates that those over 40 are most likely to encounter age discrimination when applying for jobs – over a third of workers over 50 had experienced age discrimination at work. However, the CIPD’s research found that at least one in 12 people aged under 35 are being considered too young by employers.

Commenting on the report, Dinah Worman (CIPD’s Diversity Adviser) said such levels of discrimination were seriously hampering UK business. Judging people by age creates ‘artificial problems in the labour market’. She added, “Employers will require an understanding of how to manage, recruit, reward, train and motivate employees across all age ranges, and at all stages of their careers. In addition the whole concept of retirement will have to be re-assessed.”