At a recent employee engagement conference in London, I facilitated a discussion on talent management.  As predicted in 2008, the war on talent hasn't gone away – it just hasn't been in the headlines with so many organisations right sizing to survive the recession.

Talent Management is now the biggest boardroom people issue.   

Albeit the ageing population, the survivors of the numerous headcount cuts, or the pressing need for innovation to compete with China and India, organisations need to take action to ensure they have talented and engaged people to make them successful.  And they need a strategy to not only attract talent, but a strategy to retain good people by building trust and transparent relationships.

David MacLeod (co-author of the government review on employee engagement) was the keynote speaker at the Engaging for Growth Conference, and he highlighted the keys to getting the balance right.

• Value and respect people as individuals
• Communicate the strategy of the organisation clearly and in simple terms
• Ensure that  the managers who are managing employees focus them on what is needed in their role and give them the scope to bring themselves to the role
• Organisational integrity - leaders need to be transparent and walk the talk - this means having an open door for any news – not just good news!

The group in my workshop debated whether talent management programmes should be inclusive (everyone in the business) or exclusive (the chosen few).

We decided that the best successes have been those who have nominated themselves as being ready for accelerated progression and are prepared to put in the extra effort to developing themselves.  Whether they stay or leave to work for a competitor is all down to the congruence between the values and behaivours of the organisation they work for.

To understand more about what makes talented people engaged, contact Katherine Wiid, Director of People Specialists Recrion on 01780 484910 or visit www.recrion.co.uk.

As a Career Management Coach, I often speak to individuals who have made at least 1 bad career move and they are keen not to make another.  So how can you mitigate the risk of that happening?

Perhaps you are one of many who have been lured in to accepting a sugar coated job offer only to suffer digestive problems for months to come.

Here is a great visual of the pitfalls of making job changes without taking a long term view or thinking strategically about your career.

Redundancy is often a great time to re-assess and think about what you really want.  Talking to a career coach about your options and investing in your professional development are 2 ways to ensure you take control. 

The Responding to Redundancies (R2R) scheme in the East of England offers free career coaching and a training fund of £700 to get you started.  Contact Katherine Wiid on 01780 484910 or visit www.recrion.co.uk/free to find out more.

This last week the media had a field day riding the story about MI5 agents who lack technology skills being made redundant. 

In the same space of time, I have given skills advice and redundancy counselling to several people who have not embraced technology and realise they are being left behind.  Soon everyday tasks from shopping to paying bills will all be online (some already are), hence the many government and other learning initiatives to get everyone up to speed with the digital revolution.

Casting my mind back several years to when I learnt my IT skills, I took it for granted that I knew where to find the right  keys on the keyboard as I had learnt to type.   There is something to be said for newbies first getting to grips with the keyboard – consider doing a Pitman type keyboard course - and then tackling computers. 

I would recommend taking a look at the Skills for Life initiative that is widely available across the UK.

If you are facing redundancy and would like to sharpen up on your skills, there is a practical Response to Redundancy initiative available in the East of England to help fund your training.  Take a look at www.recrion.co.uk/free for more information or call Katherine Wiid on 01780 484910.

Many of the CVs I read as a career coach and skills advisor fall in to 2 categories:

• The “yawn” category – these are the bland, templated, no personality 2 pages that would do an M15 agent proud

• The ego centric CV – these tell your audience What's In it For Me (the Candidate) and not What's In it For Them (the Employer).

The tricky thing about a CV is that it is a mixture of an autobiography and a marketing tool.  In fact most people don’t even know what CV stands for – Curriculum Vitae is Latin for “Book of Life”. Using the Book analogy – if the flyer is not interesting (the top half of the first page), then why should the reader bother to read further?

I could go on, but I'd rather spend more time suggesting ways to make your CV relevant and interesting to the person reading it.

Here are 7 tips on writing a CV that hits all the buttons:

• Personal Branding Statement – Create a clear, concise personal branding statement or elevator pitch that describes the position you want, and a single subject matter expertise (out of the many you have) that solves the biggest problem that the company and hiring manager has

• Achievements - Select Achievements that demonstrate the problems you've solved and their effect on the company's bottom line. Don't list all the problems you've solved – just choose examples that are relevant to the problems the company, department, and manager currently have

• Customise your CV – Customise your CV with Achievements and keywords that are relevant to the company to make your CV A "MUST READ".  Build rapport by using the company's own language to describe your accomplishments, rather than the language of your prior company. Use plain English and avoid using acronyms and jargon that only people in your prior company would understand.

• Address employer and hiring manager problems – Before you can address them, you have to understand what they are to begin with. Start your research before you even send a CV, to make it relevant.

• Include "nice to have's" – Hiring managers typically short list interviewed candidates to a final three to choose between. While most of the interviewed candidates are all qualified to do the job, a few usually stand out from the pack because of a "nice to have."  This could be a skill, quality or experience that the hiring manager didn't even think of when listing job criteria, but recognised its importance when discovered on a CV or in an interview. These "nice to have's" can often make the difference between getting the offer and just being one of the pack. Voluntary work or examples of professional development are two of the differentiators.

• Demonstrate Subject Matter Expertise – Listing your general skills or what you did on a day to day basis is not exciting. It's not likely to be as important to your future employer, since no two jobs have the same needs and no two companies have the same day to day responsibilities. Your future employer is interested in what problems you can solve for them. The best way to demonstrate this is to understand your target's current problems, giving specific examples of your expertise in solving these (or very similar) problems, and branding yourself as a subject matter expert.

• Why you want the job – If you haven't conveyed to the hiring manager why you want that specific job at that specific company in a way that is beneficial to them, you haven’t got a chance! A hiring manager isn't interested in the fact that you want to move ahead in your career, that you want specific experiences, or that you'll take just about any job to keep paying your mortgage. A hiring manager is only interested in the fact that you want the job because you have demonstrated expertise to solve their specific problems.

Investing time in getting your CV right pays dividends down the line.  For more information on CV writing and Career Management Strategies, contact Katherine Wiid of Recrion at 01780 484910 or visit www.recrion.co.uk.

So much has been written about women having to conform to a man's world to be taken seriously in business.  Breaking into the Boy's Club by Molly Shepard gives women 8 ways to get ahead in business.

Now the Peterborough City Council and East of England Development Agency (EEDA) have gone a step further and founded a Women’s Business Centre in Bridge Street.

The centre is the second of its kind in the UK. As well as offering advice about financing and setting up a business, the centre will include a wi-fi enabled computer and hot desking area, a training room and mailbox facilities which women can use for business correspondence. A crèche is on site for use by mothers who are taking part in the centre’s wide range of training courses and there will be a café and a wardrobe exchange.  To find out more, click here.

There is additional training support available to women who are facing redundancy in the East of England and are keen to develop new skills.  The R2R scheme offers a training fund of £700 as well as professional careers advice – contact Katherine Wiid an accredited R2R adviser on 01780 484910 or visit www.recrion.co.uk/free to see if you are eligible.

The public sector is experiencing the pain the private sector did a year ago – redundancies are on the increase and civil servants are protesting.

Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union are planning strikes around the country resulting in the potential closure of Jobcentres for 2 days at a time.

So if you are intending to sign on at a job centre in the month of March, you might not get the support you are hoping for!  Read here for more information on the proposed strikes

For more positive support, why not sign on to the Response to Redundancy scheme in the East of England that gives you access to free career's advice and a training fund of up to £1200?

Contact Recrion on 01780 484910 or visit www.recrion.co.uk/free for more information.

If you can answer YES to one of the 3 questions below, read on because you are going to need a resilient career strategy:

• Is the company or division you work for restructuring or merging?
• Are you at risk of redundancy?
• Are you very tempted to accept a voluntary redundancy deal – yet something is stopping you grabbing the cheque because you aren't confident your skills are portable?

Clearly the end of a company or a division — whether through bankruptcy, merger, restructuring, or shutdown — is often painful and traumatic for everyone involved. Most of us emotionally identify with our employer so even when our job continues with a new entity, or we get a financial payout, there is still a sense of loss.

Given the reality of work in the 21st century, it might be worth having an "insurance policy".

Consider in advance how you would handle the impending death of your company or division:

• Are there skills that you need to develop to become more portable?
• Are there experiences that will position you for an important role in a successor company or with another business in the same industry?
• Do you have a clear sense of what you would want to do if you had to exit your company? Would you want to reinvent yourself, go off on your own, or continue the same work with another organisation?

Whilst your company might not have an afterlife, the good news is that your career will.

Here are 3 actions you can take to get ready:

• Start networking before you need to so that you have a group of people ready and willing to help you when you need them.  Ensure you have an online and offline networking strategy
• Hunt down free training and skills development funds - there are some generous schemes around until December 2010.
• Take time out to consider what you are really passionate about and start exploring how feasible it might be to turn this passion into a financial venture.

For more information on Career Management Strategies, contact Katherine Wiid of Recrion at 01780 484910 or visit www.recrion.co.uk.

"It is never too late to become what you might have been – and it is never too late to start!"

The hidden job market is alive and well: 60 – 80% of the jobs filled in 2009 were by employers hiring behind their castle walls.  They didn't always advertise what they were doing, they didn't use recruiters.  So what did they do?

So much of business is done using networking:  building relationships with contacts and finding out what pain those prospects are experiencing so that conversations are meaningful and benefits based.

Yet this can take time. And if you have just been told you are at risk of redundancy then your contact list might not be extensive enough.

I loved this article by Rosabeth Kanter
Four Ways to Attack the Castle — And Get a Job, Get Ahead, Make Change

She likens organisations to "a medieval castle that doesn't want you inside and doesn't want change.  If you attack the castle head on you risk all the defenses going up at once. (Visualise the moats filling, iron bars clanging down, doors slamming shut, and weapons activated.)"

She has some great ideas on how to find a way to go around and underneath the castle with small, less visible steps that don't trigger defenses.

Whether you are facing redundancy or just want a change of  job or career, it helps to have multiple ways to attack the castle.

Recrion specialises in Career and People Management.  For more information on seminars and 1:1 coaching on Social Networking for Career Success contact us on 01780 484910 or visit our website www.recrion.co.uk.

It was interesting to read a recent report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) regarding the high number of roles being offshored and the steady number of migrant workers in the UK.

The CIPD and KPMG Labour Market Outlook survey found around one in five employers recruited migrant workers in the past three months, with public sector employers more likely to hire migrant workers than private sector ones.

Of the 700 companies surveyed around 40 per cent say they have vacancies that are hard-to-fill and more than half of those vacancies are skills-related with engineer, doctor and nurse positions the most difficult to recruit for.

In seems ironic that despite rising unemployment, employers are still struggling to recruit the people they need and are turning abroad to plug the gap.

So what is the solution?

It is important that companies keep investing in learning and development programmes and resist the urge to cut back too aggressively to save costs.  It is also up to each individual to proactively pursue personal development programmes.

During the recession, many funded training programmes have been introduced that give employees opportunities to re-train in new directions.  The R2R scheme in the East of England offers £1200 to anyone living or working in the region who is at risk of redundancy.

To access support to help ease the burden of redundancies, contact Katherine Wiid Director of Recrion who is actively facilitating the R2R scheme on 01780 484910 or visit www.recrion.co.uk

The recession has changed the way many people seek and find employment and new business opportunities.  Third parties such as recruitment agencies are being sidelined by companies unwilling to pay fees and candidates tired of being treated as a number on a database.

Employers and job seekers are starting to use online networking sites to find each other and start a dialogue.  However, the increased use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can have its drawbacks.

4 out of 10 HR managers in the UK have chosen not to hire a candidate as a result of a negative online profile, according to research by Microsoft.

In the survey of 1000 HR professionals, 64% said they thought it appropriate to search the web for information on a person before recruiting them, and 41% admitted to rejecting candidates on that basis.

The challenge as a candidate is to manage your social media footprint with agility.

Being too formal on Facebook won't endear you to your school / university friends, yet discretion is the key if you want pass a future employer's scrutiny.  Better to opt for LinkedIn, a business social network where you can build a career based profile and learn from peers and mentors.

I am convinced that should Microsoft run a similar survey in 6 – 12 months time, even more HR managers will be snooping online.  Take steps to protect your online profile – there is a big difference between online visibility and online credibility!

Recrion specialises in Career and People Management.  For more information on seminars and 1:1 coaching on Social Networking for Career Success contact us on 01780 484910 or visit our website www.recrion.co.uk.