employeebuydirect.com

Today is Equal Pay Day, where the Fawcett Society will renew their call to the government to bridge the gender pay gap. The gap that currently exist between male and female full-time staff is in the region of 17%, which is equivalent to a woman receiving her last pay cheque of the year in October, which in this day and age I find quite a shocking statistic.

Research carried out by CMI shows that overall remuneration when taking a job is a lower priority for women than it is for men and it is believed that employers take advantage of this, offering lower wages to women than they would to their male counterparts. The research also showed that women treat how the role interacts with their home life and whether it involves late night work with a higher level of importance than pay.

With the recession having slowed the jobs market down considerably it’s becoming more common for professionals to accept stop-gap jobs. If this is the case for you it’s important that try to stay ahead of the curve in readiness for when the recruiters start calling again. One thing you can do is to accept voluntary work for charities. So if you’re a marketer or an accountant try and find a charity that needs some marketing consultancy or their books keeping.

In particular if you work in the world of internet marketing offer to manage a charities AdWords account. Google offer an AdWords grant where charities can use it to promote themselves for free. This would be a great addition to your cv and you are doing some good in the process.

In Part 1 of this blog post I started talking about how LinkedIn can be used to keep your cv up to date but that’s not all that it’s good for. Creating a LinkedIn account is the first step towards managing your online brand. Once your cv is up there follow the steps to completing 100% of your profile. If you follow these steps then you’ll immediately start to hear from interested recruiters.

The next step that I took was to get myself a blog via WordPress Now don’t be intimidated by this, writing a blog isn’t like being a novelist or a playwright, all you have to do is give your view on a given topic. If you make the blog related to your career you can easily use it to put case studies on and show how you’ve overcome problems and difficulties in your day-to-day work. This looks great to a prospective employer who can see you demonstrating your skills before they’ve even met with you.

A word of warning though, as mentioned in a previous post on this blog, your online profile include the likes of Facebook and MySpace and if you have personal accounts with either of these or anything like them just make sure that there’s nothing on there that can undo all your hard work.

For me the recession has made me realise that I’d taken my eye off the ball when it comes to my career. I was made redundant during the summer and in all honesty I never thought I would be, ever. At first when I was made redundant I was extremely confident that I would walk straight into another job and I managed to get plenty of interviews very quickly. What I failed to take into account was the amount of other people who were in the same boat, some of which were more experienced than me and willing to earn the same as me. Long story short, I managed to get a job eventually, after a great deal of rejection, but the lessons I’ve learnt are invaluable.

Steering your career path needs constant management, meaning that your cv should be constantly updated with your role and your current achievements. An easy and more interesting way of doing this is by getting a LinkedIn account. Create you cv online with LinkedIn and then post regular updates on it, then if you do need to get a cv together quickly then you’ve got all your updates to refer to and all in one place. There’s nothing worse than trying to remember events and dates of things you’ve done in the workplace.

To be continued…

The latest focus of the Westminster expense scandal appears to be the employment of family members by MPS. It is widely believed that when Sir Christopher Kelly announces his expenses reform package next month that MPs employing family members to provide back office services will be banned. It seems that this has been widely practised for a long time and to a certain extent makes sense.

If you work in politics it’s entirely feasible that you met your spouse through your occupation and if you didn’t she was probably heavily involved in supporting you to get where you are. Either way it would mean that your other half would have a better than normal grasp of what it takes to work in politics, rendering them highly employable. In this case I really fail to see how the proposed ban could be enforced.

In my opinion this is one step too far for this scandal. I accept the repaying of ridiculous expenses and stopping profit making on second homes but how can you stop people who are qualified to do a job, from doing it. Not to worry though, politicians being politicians have already come with a way around it. They’re just going to employ each others family members. And they wonder why we have such a great affection for them!

Many people spend their lives waiting for that big idea that’s going to change the world and sky rocket them to becoming millionaires. The truth of the matter is that most successful entrepreneurs never knew what it was that was going to make them successful, they just knew that was what they wanted. Good businesses always begin with a collection of good ideas and over time some of those ideas are discarded, some are expanded and new ideas are added all the time.

As an example Twitter was started with the purpose of providing status updates from your mobile phone. It wasn’t until several years later that they realised that the “big idea” was actually real time search, whether you’re on a computer or on a mobile phone. The point is that most big businesses started in the same way and you shouldn’t be put off by always looking for that elusive idea, as long as you’ve got a few ideas just jump straight in and start your own business.

Children’s Secretary Ed Balls has announced plans today, to give careers advice to children as young as seven. Under the new plans primary schools will be expected to offer careers advice to children aged 7-11, with the ultimate aim being that children receive this advice up to the age of 18.

The reason quoted for this move is to cut down on the amount of people who say they would have done things differently if given the opportunity. This sounds like a great idea but its effectiveness is completely reliant upon the quality of advice given and its integration into the education system. If not administered correctly we could well end up with a whole generation of people all wishing that they’d been given no advice in the first place.

Are we still in recession? Are we out of recession, after 15 months? The truth is that no one seems to know. The government are telling us one thing and certain specialist organisations are saying that we have at least another 12 months in front of us. No matter what the truth is, the fact is that it is going to take quite some time before workplaces recover from the hardest hitting recession since records began.

The majority of managers believe that pay freezes, increased workloads and pressure and the loss of work colleagues to compulsory redundancy mean that employee morale is at an all time low. At a time like this, leadership and employee relations are key, but a lack of managers and quality training mean that these are set to be particularly testing times for all of us.

When using social networking sites most people treat it as their own little space on the web, where they’re free to voice their opinions and vent their emotions. This is true but you do need to be aware of who or what your opinions and emotions are aimed at.

There have been several well publicised cases over the last few years of companies bringing legal action against current or former employees for defamation. In one particular case, a British secretary working France told anecdotes about office life on a blog never using her real name and never referring to the company by its name. She was ultimately dismissed because the company felt that regardless of the anonymity, the people reading knew who she was referring to.

So there is obviously a fine line between discussing work or colleagues in a social networking context and being perceived as bad mouthing. At present with such emphasis being placed on social media, I would always suggest always airing on the side of caution when mentioning anything work related online. You’ve been warned!

Researchers from the National Centre for Social Research, commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions, sent out thousands of fake CVs to employers all over the country in an attempt to uncover discrimination occurring due to someone’s name. Three fake names were used, Nazia Mahmood, Mariam Namagembe and Alison Taylor, all the CVs contained similar experience and qualifications.

Of the three applicants, the one with the apparently white name took nine attempts before being offered an interview, whereas the other names took just under double that to get the same response. 987 applications were made from November 2008 to May 2009 and were sent to a broad spectrum of employers in several industries.

The results of this research clearly show that many employers do discriminate when it comes to race and Employment Minister, Jim Knight feels that this sort of discrimination has no place in modern British society.