“The pursuit of excellence is relentless,” says former Red Arrows commanding officer
Jas Hawker is a former leader of the RAF Red Arrows display team and now consults with a wide range of corporate, public sector and professional sports clients. In the past he has held high-level appointments with the Ministry of Defence and has been deployed to Afghanistan as a Senior Air Adviser. He has led the […]
Use mentoring to hold on to talent, employers told
Employees are not being given enough mentoring opportunities despite the fact that it could “stem” the talent drain, according to new research. The report, by HR services group Penna Plc, found that a fifth of the 2,000 employees questioned are not currently mentoring or being mentored, even though they would be keen to do so, […]
How should HR deal with mentoring arrangements?
Mentoring can take place in different ways – either internally within a business (senior staff mentoring junior staff), staff providing mentoring to external beneficiaries and the employer bringing in mentors from outside the business to support staff. All of these possibilities have different implications, benefits and risks to the employer. Perhaps the main benefit to […]
Book review: The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford
Title: The Trusted AdvisorAuthors: David Maister, Charles Green and Robert GalfordISBN: 978-0743207768 Reviewed by Alan Warner, MTP plc This is not a new book but thirteen years after publication, it is still to be found in book stores. Also the wonders of Kindle and iBooks mean that we now have far easier access to works like this […]
Blog: Seven career questions to ask yourself for 2013
It’s that time in January when we take stock and decide on our resolutions for the year ahead. So I thought it might be useful to offer my advice on what you should be doing to enhance your career in 2013. Make time to think about your career. There is nothing more important than […]
Talent management in a post-recession world
The UK may have officially emerged from recession towards the end of last year, but many employers are still worried about the stability of their workforce – especially if greater business confidence and improving job opportunities make it more likely that talented staff will start jumping ship. In our HR 2012 Salary and Market Insight […]
Christina’s Counsel: How do I get into HR?
Hello and welcome to this month’s dilemma: The challenge A reader wrote to me recently asking for advice about to switch his career from business administration to HR. Just recently having been made redundant, he wondered if now was a good time to make the move into an entirely new field. HR appealed […]
Blog: Just what is an executive coach exactly?
What do Andy Murray, Mo Farrah, Jessica Ennis and Robbie Grabarz have in common? They have a coach who has made a difference. Whether it be Ivan Lendl, Fuzz Ahmed, Toni Minichiello or Alberto Salazar, all have been accredited with making the difference between success and failure by their charges. In […]
Maximising your emotional capital
For 10 years the research has told us that, to besuccessful in our personal and professional lives, we need to show emotional as well as cognitive intelligence. Clear links have also been established between specific emotional skills and outstanding success in the leadership arena. Of course, as HR professionals, we’ve always known that having […]
Blog: What is…..mentoring?
Mentoring is a supportive form of employee training that takes place outside the conventional top-down manager-employee relationship. It typically comes in the form of long-term guidance provided by an experienced employee, the mentor, to someone less experienced, the mentee, in an effort to support the mentee’s overall development. A mentor is someone who has […]
Blog: Are you serious about adopting a 70:20:10 development model?
Are business serious about 70:20:10 development? Or is it becoming a lazy way of reducing budgets while expecting already over stretched staff to take on increased responsibility for their own learning? 70:20:10 Development models seem to be gaining an increasing number of supporters in organisations HR and L&D departments. The idea itself is […]
News: Budget cuts see public servants improvise to get training
Public sector workers are being forced to turn to colleagues and the web to boost the skills that they require to take on new responsibilities, after budget cuts have led to workplace training provision being slashed. According to a survey among 1,100 UK public sector workers undertaken by recruitment consultancy, Badenoch & Clark, about 14.5% are […]
How to manage a mixed age workforce
Two years ago, the number of people who were over 65 outstripped those who were under 16 for the first time. Moreover, the abolition of the Default Retirement Age now means that older workers are likely to stay in the workplace for longer – either through choice or economic necessity. Meanwhile, Generation Y-ers […]
CEO Insight: Sinead Hasson on Hasson Associates’ CSR programme
The arrival of 2012 brought with it the news that there are still 2.65 million people out of work in the UK. Widespread redundancies, salary freezes or even cuts as well as the increasing loss of employee benefits are not only hitting employers hard, but also causing employees to question their job security. And […]
Blog: Ten top tips for taking control of your career
It goes without saying that the number one thing you need to do to manage your career within in an organisation is to work hard and do a really good job, exceeding expectations wherever possible. But that in itself is not enough to actually take control of your career and achieve your aspirations. Here […]
HRD Insight: Leigh Lafever-Ayer on Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s women’s mentoring scheme
Many companies are grappling with how to help more women attain senior roles at the moment, especially since the Davies Review shone a spotlight on the shortage of women in the boardroom. Our approach to the issue at Enterprise Rent-A-Car has been to introduce a mentoring scheme in order to focus on helping women progress […]
Blog: Charity needs to begin at home for third sector HR
I find many people tend to assume that the Third Sector is mostly staffed by tree-hugging hippies, and is full of warm and fuzzy organisations where group hugs are on each meeting agenda. (This is usually the view of people who work in the private and public sectors, funnily enough.) But did you know […]
Half of UK managers expect redundancies in 2012
Nearly half of managers expect their organisations to cut more jobs in 2012, with more than a third feeling insecure about their own employment prospects. These are the key findings of a survey among 800 bosses in UK companies undertaken by the Chartered Management Institute. The study also revealed that more than half of those […]
Are we ready for an older workforce?
Up until the middle of the last century, when a worker retired, the expectation was that they would not live for long afterwards. Sadly, this situation is still true in a minority of cases, although most have much longer to enjoy their retirement than in the past. In 2011, people born in 1946 will […]
New investment for 10,000 more volunteer business mentors
The Coalition Government is investing £1.2 million in order to recruit and train 10,000 new mentors in a bid to boost support for entrepreneurs and stimulate the economy. The money will be used to support the Small Firms Enterprise Development Initiative‘s new ‘Get Mentoring’ scheme for volunteers from small-to-medium businesses who may not otherwise be […]
