UK Salary Gap Rise

The average advertised salary in London is now £10,000 more than the rest of the UK, according to new figures.

The figures, from search engine AllTheTopBananas.com, show that the average advertised salary around the UK is £31,128, compared with London's average advertised salary of £41,500.

The highest average advertised salary outside London is to be found in East Anglia, at £34,487, while the North West has the lowest at £29,676.

Region with average advertised salary:

London - £41,079

East Anglia - £32,551

Wales - £31,795

West Midlands - £31,673

South East - £30,765

South West - £30,496

East Midlands - £30,146

Yorkshire & Humber - £29,782

Scotland - £29,538

North East - £28,941

North West - £28,641

Dave Martin, managing director at AllTheTopBananas, said: "Advertised salaries are rising faster in London than the rest of the UK and the gap is getting bigger. This is a trend that is likely to continue throughout the next 12 months. We are also seeing advertised salaries continue to rise overall, putting added pressure on inflation. There's a chance this could add to the UK's economic woes in the next 12 months."

Article Source:
BD Recruitment are a specialist recruiter for web development jobs, ppc jobs and business analysis jobs, based in Manchester, UK.

Penzance Arts Club – Up for Sale

Will someone want to come in and keep the arts club as it is, or will they want to live there themselves or will the building be a private development. For those in the vicinity of Penzance, Cornwall and involved in the arts in any way this will be of interest.

First here’s what you’ll be getting:

Grade II listed 4 storey Georgian building.
Views over Mounts Bay towards St. Michael's Mount.
7 bedrooms and a caretaker flat.
Reception hall/ foyer/ gallery.
Spacious bar lounge.
Lower ground floor restaurant & kitchen.
Walled garden and terrace.
Garage and courtyard.
The Penzance Arts Club Hotel is featured in 'HIP Hotel' series.


The origins of such a wonderful building, well, Chapel House was originally built as Portuguese Embassy in 1781.

Now an insight into the club, and a little more detail about what you’ll be getting:

The Penzance Arts Club is up for sale after fifteen years of trading. It is currently on the market for £895,000 and is being sold with the options of either, a going concern, a private house or for development.

Chapel House is situated at the bottom end of Chapel Street, one of the oldest streets in Penzance and is fast becoming known as the Cornish equivalent of Cork Street in London with its numerous art galleries featuring old and new paintings, sculpture and new media.

Under the present ownership Chapel House has been tastefully restored and retains most of its original features. It has been the Penzance Arts Club for the past fifteen years with approximately 300 members.

The principal function of the Art Club is to provide a congenial venue for people of like minds to meet and entertain their friends, colleagues and business associates. The club is dedicated, in its own way, to promoting the Arts in Cornwall and the South West and hosts many functions including, exhibitions, parties, weddings, poetry, life drawing classes, jazz and blues evenings.

This seven bed boutique hotel attracts people from far and wide and has over the years been frequented by many celebrities (it is in Cornwall), also having reciprocal arrangements with several other clubs world wide including the Dover Street Arts Club in London. It has a very bohemian atmosphere with a very shabby, chic style.

There have been many articles written about the Penzance Arts Club over the years, both nationally and internationally. It would make a great home and/ or business for someone wishing to live and work on the same premises. The top floor could easily be converted back into an owner flat with spectacular views over Mounts Bay, leaving four letting bedrooms for income together with the bar, restaurant and Art's Club.

Chapel House sits in a very prominent position and is one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in Penzance.

So what are you waiting for…

Full colour brochure available at Savills.
Or have a leisurely look at the Penzance arts club website.

One Man's Loss is Another Man's Gain

Adding to the depressed state of the economy, the TUC is confident that the number of individuals out of work for a year or more will double by the end of next year. This will bring the total of long-term unemployed to 700,000 and the number of unemployed, in total, to just over 2m. These figures surely bring with them the concern for out of date skills and the difficulty of getting the long-term unemployed back into employment.

Chief Economist at the CIPD, John Philpott, strongly agrees, stating that the combination of the rising number of claimants coupled with failing business confidence will only be cause to further jobs cuts on top of the ones already pushing the economy to it's limits.

However, not everyone holds such a dismissal view and on the other side of the employment market you could argue that things are improving. Yes, there is no denying that the number of companies making redundancies is at an all time high. Yet the successful companies, arguably the ones which as an employee you would want to be with anyway, are going from strength to strength. The number of companies going out of business is resulting in the striving companies devouring the market share relinquished by the companies who are bowing out.

Ask a recruitment consultant in the IT industry, for example, and they will most definitely tell you that their best clients are recruiting now more than ever. Tom Hadley, director of external relations at REC, supports this view stating 'feedback from recruitment professionals on the front line of the labour market confirms that employers are still recruiting, although it is clearly a more competitive environment for jobseekers following years of an extremely candidate-driven market.

Our message to jobseekers is to speak with local recruitment agencies, find out what sectors and employers are recruiting and even ask them for some guidance on longer term career options'.

With figures showing the largest unemployment increase for over a decade, with worse predicted yet to come, in times like this jobseekers need to enhance their added value and prove that you, above the rest, can offer more. Companies are still recruiting the game just got harder.

Author:
Chris Crawford is the MD of BD Recruitment a specialist recruiter for web designer jobs, marketing account manager jobs and web programmer jobs, based in Manchester, UK.

Female workers paid less

The Battle of the Sexes continues in the workplace according to a new survey from CareerBuilder.co.uk. Although employers are increasingly introducing programs to promote equality, 30 per cent of female workers in the United Kingdom say they feel they are paid less than their counterparts of the opposite sex with the same skills and qualifications. Thirteen per cent of men in the UK say they feel they are paid less than their female counterparts. The CareerBuilder.co.uk survey, "Workplace Equality," included more than 3,700 workers across seven European countries and also surveyed workers in the United States.

Overall, 38 per cent of the female European workers surveyed, believe they experience pay discrimination when compared to their male counterparts with the same qualifications. Female workers in Germany (45 per cent) were the most likely of those surveyed to report wage discrimination and women in the Netherlands (28 per cent) were the least likely to report wage discrimination.

Per cent of women workers who say they are paid less than their male counterparts with the same skills and qualifications:

· Germany 45 per cent
· France: 43 per cent
· Italy: 36 per cent
· Sweden: 35 per cent
· United Kingdom: 30 per cent
· Spain: 30 per cent
· Netherlands: 28 per cent
· United States: 34 per cent
· Europe Overall: 38 per cent

While female workers in the UK reported less discrimination than European workers overall, there is still much work to be done to promote equality in the workplace. Companies recognise the competitive advantage a diverse workforce provides and are placing more emphasis on recruitment and retention practices that encourage equality.

Author:
Chris Crawford is the MD of BD Recruitment a specialist recruiter for graphic designer jobs, account manager jobs and web programmer jobs, based in Manchester, UK.

Write every web page with a view to its connections to other pages.

Unless you are writing a single page web site, the pages you write will always be connected to other pages on the site.

Here are my questions...and be honest in your answers:

When you write a web page, how much attention do you pay to its relationship with other pages on the site?

Do you think about the pages people may have read immediately BEFORE arriving on the page you are writing?

Do you think about the pages that people will visit immediately AFTER reading that page?

Understand this difference about the web...

Unlike with other media, the connections between the different pages on a web site can be very complicated.

With a catalog or magazine, one page follows the other in a linear, predictable fashion. The relationship between one page and the next is always the same. The next page follows the one before.

But it's different online, and a lot harder for people to figure out where they are and where they should go next.

Imagine not being able to hold a print catalog in your hand in its entirety. Instead, you are given just one page to look at a time. Once you have read that one page, you then have to ask for the next page you'd like to see.

How do you know which is the "best" next page to see? How do you know which page to ask for?

It would drive you crazy. You'd scream, "Hey, just give me the entire catalog so I can see where I am and see where I want to go next!"

Online, visitors to web site are served up just one page at a time.

And we can't help them by giving them the whole web site at once. We are constricted by the medium and by the monitor.

In other words, our visitors have a really hard time figuring out where they are and where they should go next.

Here's how you need to help them...

First, understand that visitors to an internal web page won't always arrive from "the page before". Some will come from the home page, if there's a link, some will come there direct from a search engine, and some will arrive via some other internal page on your site.

In other words, if you have links to a page from ten other pages on your site, people can arrive there from any of those pages...in addition to those arriving from links outside your site.

This means that each page has to open with a headline and introductory copy that will make sense to people REGARDLESS of which page they arrived from.

This can be tough to do.

All too often writers will assume that visitors to a second level page have all arrived from a link on the home page. And they write that second level page as if it is a continuation of the information on the home page.

That works fine for visitors who DO arrive from the home page, but not so well for those who don't.

Just be aware that the web is not a linear reader experience, like a catalog, and write accordingly.

Here's another way to help your readers...

If you study your server logs and track the behavior of your visitors, over time you will see some clear patterns emerge.

For instance, you will usually find that after reading a particular page about 80% of people will find their way to one of three or four other pages.

For instance, if a financial services web site has a page on insurance, 80% of the readers of that page may want to then go to 1) the page on auto insurance, 2) the page on home insurance or 3) the page on farm insurance.

When this proves to be the case, make it easy for everyone by providing direct, descriptive links to those three or four pages at the end of the current page.

As with a catalog being served up one page at a time, it helps people if you can tell at least 80% of your readers, "Here are the pages you probably want to look at next."

Author:
Nick Usbourne
home of the Excess Voice newsletter for online copywriters

6 million People Live In Homes Where No-One Is Working

Around six million people live in homes where no one is working, according to new figures.

The statistics, from the Office for National Statistics, reveal that 4.3m adults and 1.77m children reside in welfare-dependent homes. The number of homes in which no one works has risen by 43,000 since 2003.

James Clappison, a Tory welfare reform spokesman, told the Daily Mail: "If nearly 1.8m children are growing up in households with no one in work, they are potentially being condemned to a cycle of low achievement and unemployment."

Debbie Scott, chief executive at Tomorrow's People, an independent charity that helps the long-term unemployed back into work, told Recruiter: "We are acutely aware that there are unacceptable numbers of households with people that have never worked. We need to work with the whole family in getting them back to work. We are about to commission a research project this to identify some strategies to look into this problem."

Richard Bacon, a Tory MP on the committee, which acts as a watchdog over public spending, said: "The Department for Work and Pensions does not know how many people are out of work by choice, rather than by chance.

"Properly targeted help must be put in place for those who want to work. Only then will the Government be able to flush out the shirkers who are sticking up two fingers at hard-working families and treating the benefit system like a cash machine."

The committee's report pointed out that the burden of worklessness is being borne by the country at a time when an expanding economy has produced record levels of employment. The proportion of working age people with jobs has reached a historic high of just under 75 per cent.

At the same time, the official unemployment tally says only a few more than 800,000 are out of a job and able to work.

However evidence has been piling up that millions of Britons have been content to spend entire lives on benefits while four out of every five new jobs have been taken by immigrants.

Author:
Chris Crawford is the MD of BD Recruitment a specialist recruiter for creative account manager jobs, marketing account manager jobs and technical project manager jobs, based in Manchester, UK.

3.3 Million Workers Are Not Confident They Will Keep Their Jobs

According to a new YouGov poll commissioned by the TUC more than 3.3 million workers (13 per cent of the workforce) are not confident they will still be in their job in a year's time.

The report, found that that one in five Welsh workers fear job cuts, while 17% of Scots are worried they may find themselves out of work.

Workers in the east of England are the most optimistic. Only 7 per cent are not confident of being in their job in a year’s time. They are followed by workers in London, Yorkshire and the west Midlands where 12 per cent lack the confidence in being in their jobs in a year.

People who earn between £10,000 and £15,000 feel less secure about keeping their jobs whereas employees earning more than £50,000 seemed more confident. Non- Union members seemed less confident about being in their job in a years time compared to 48 per cent of union members who where optimistic about their employment.

Brendan Barber, general secretary at the TUC, said: "These poll findings show just how many people are getting worried about losing their job in the current economic slowdown. Of course, this does not mean that unemployment will rise by anything like three million, but it does show just how jittery people have become about the economy and their own job."

"The economy will inevitably slow this year and next, given the credit crunch and the impact of higher oil, food and commodity prices. But there is a real danger that if everyone thinks that the downturn will be deeper than it needs to be it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"These findings add to the growing pressure on the Government and economic policy makers to put growth first by doing all they can to restore confidence and boost investment".

Author:
Chris Crawford is the MD of BD Recruitment a specialist recruiter for creative manager jobs, marketing management jobs and business analysis jobs, based in Manchester, UK.