Posts by Alan

In 2009 Alan wrote an article predicting a Summer of Discontent, which he revised in 2010 to include the need for all businesses to have a Business Continuity Plan. Today the first mass strike will affect many of us. Read his article here and think about how well you are prepared for such disruption.

The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) Network Group on LinkedIn has produced a powerful debate regarding the willingness of private sector organisations to employ workers with a public service background – although it has recently widened. The debate has highlighted the difficulty some private sector workers have had moving to the public sector as well. This discussion came about as the result of the survey by uSwitch, which is shown below. If you are a member of the CMI, and on LinkedIn, you can follow this discussion here. For those that are not, some of the perceptions have been both interesting and amusing. There is a widely held perception that public sector workers have unrealistic expectations of the rewards and benefits package they would expect from...

According to a survey by uSwitch 22% of small to medium business enterprises (SMEs) intend to hire new staff, but just 2% of them would actively seek to recruit public sector workers. Almost a quarter of small businesses would hire a public sector worker if there was no one else for the job, but 10% would never hire a public sector worker. The survey, says uSwitch, reveals “a widely spread perception that public sector industry has developed over-indulged staff with unrealistic expectations of the workplace” with 55% of SME owners believing public sector workers to be unrealistic in their expectations about pay, holidays and employment terms, and only 11% of those questioned considered public sector workers to be as productive as their private sector...

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending an all party parliamentary debate on management apprenticeships. An interesting evening with an overriding message – that the apprenticeship assessment process has become over-complicated. I would go one stage further and say that the majority of apprenticeships suffer from the legacy of the Labour government’s fixation with performance indicators. Apprenticeships are designed to give the candidate a vocational qualification, which is ideally suited to kinaesthetic learners who are not academically suited. Yet, the majority of level 2 NVQs still require the candidate to achieve C grade GCSEs in English, Maths and Science which makes them almost discriminatory against the very people they are aimed at. If...