Worried about your Banking IT job? ReadyPeople has some options for you

Barclays to scrap 1,800 UK tech jobs

I have copied the full article (below in blue) from The Register which I highly recommend for IT news and jobs. I find it interesting how different organisations are reacting to the crunch and I shall not comment on the merits of the various approaches at this stage.

If you are at all concerned about your job prospects or simply want to understand more about the opportunities open to you - drop me an email at gerald@readypeople.eu and receive a personal appraisal of the options available. In the mean time - you may take some comfort from the following:

* IT requirements across the UK in general still appear to be increasing

* if you have .NET skills there are many .NET job opportunities outside of the City (time to ditch the cost and hassle of commuting?) - If you are based in South Essex for instance you could be earning London money - plus saving the best part of £3000 on season tickets and getting a couple of hours of your life back per day (priceless ;-)

* Not all banks are slimming down their IT - some in the UK are investing heavily in new technology and eager to attract the right people - get in touch and we'll let you know more!

* The growth in IT jobs is spread across the UK - we are recruiting from as far north as Aberdeen, througout the Midlands, South East and South West too.

* The Far East and Middle East are still growing rapidly and demand for skilled English-speaking IT people is huge - we have IT recruitment partners all over the world - time to broaden your horizon?

Gerald Morgan
ReadyPeople IT Recruitment
IT Jobs from the Intelligent Staffing Network
0870 89 66 900

El reg article follows:

Barclays is to axe 1,800 IT jobs in the UK as part of a major business overhaul to set up technology centres in key offshore locations around the world, with 700 workers being forced out by September.

The bank first told staff about its outsourcing plans in January this year. In a canned statement Barclays said it hoped to “become one of a handful of universal banks leading the global financial services industry, helping our customers and clients throughout the world to achieve their goals.

“To achieve our ambition, we need to transform to a global organisation, able to serve the needs of our customers and clients who have operations around the world.”

Barclays added that it will create "centrally-managed technologies centres of excellence" [sic] in Europe, Africa and Asia. Offshore locations understood to have already been pinpointed by the company include Hungary, India and Singapore.

The firm admitted that “some roles will move offshore” and that “some roles will fall away”. However, it declined to offer a definitive number.

Trade union Unite, formerly known as Amicus, reckoned that up to 1,800 permanent and contractor tech jobs at the bank in the UK will be scrapped by 2011. Barclays will axe global infrastructure and service delivery (GISD) jobs.

Most Blighty-based staff will be redeployed or offered voluntary redundancy. Around 50 employees out of the 700 initially affected face compulsory redundancy by September this year, said Unite. It added that future growth at Barclays could prevent further losses at the firm.

About 1,000 GISD jobs will remain in the UK, based in the company’s Radbroke and London offices. Barclays plans to create around 1,700 new roles offshore over the next three years.

Unite national secretary Keith Brookes said in an internal Barclays newsletter (dated 23 April and seen by The Register) that the union has been pushing for the bank to stick by a globalisation deal inked with Unite. Under that agreement staff should be given three months' working notice, plus three months' paid notice of redundancy.

Brookes added that an undertaking had also been agreed with Barclays that "there will be no more job losses this year outside of offshoring".

In May this year Barclays Capital, the investment division of the bank, told its IT contractors to choose between a 10 per cent pay cut or a quick exit from the company.

The decision, which was seen as an alternative to cutting jobs as the bank negotiates the current financial crisis, sparked outrage among contract staff, who were forced to signal their "acceptance" of the wage cut.

ReadyPeople IT Job alert 2/2 - DOTNET developer required - Essex

This is one of a series of urgent job alerts - ReadyPeople IT recruitment News and Views will return shortly - watch this space!

Certified DOTNET (vb.net, c#, asp.net) & SQL developer required for leading South Essex Microsoft Gold Partner to £39k .

Our highly-rated client is growing once again due to continuing success with their international blue-chip client base.

With exciting projects, 25 days holiday and regular social events for the whole team this is a great place to work.

To join this highly professional team - an excellent track record of dotnet development & work with SQL is essential. As a key part of the development team you will be involved in projects using vb.net, asp.net and c#. Much of this work requires good knowledge of SQL too and any experience with sharepoint, Dynamics CRM, or Sage CRM would be a bonus.

This is an urgent requirement so if you have the required dotnet skills - apply now or ask us for more details ASAP certified Dotnet (vb.net, c#, asp.net) & SQL developer required for leading South Essex Microsoft Gold Partner to £39k.


ReadyPeople IT Recruitment Ltd
0870 89 66 900
gerald@readypeople.eu

ReadyPeople IT Job alert 1/2 - CRM Consultant - Essex

This is one of a series of urgent job alerts - ReadyPeople IT recruitment News and Views will return shortly - watch this space!

Microsoft Dynamics CRM consultant developer required for leading South Essex Microsoft Gold Partner to £45k .

Our highly-rated client is growing once again due to continuing success with their international blue-chip client base. With exciting projects, 25 days holiday and regular social events for the whole team this is a great place to work.

To join this highly professional team - experience with Dynamics CRM is a must and dot.net (VB.net or C#) and SQL experience would be ideal. Sage CRM experience would also be a bonus. This is an urgent requirement so if you have Dynamics CRM experience - apply now or ask us for more details ASAP Dynamics CRM developer required for leading South Essex Microsoft Gold Partner to £45k .

ReadyPeople IT Recruitment Ltd
0870 89 66 900
gerald@readypeople.eu

IT Job Alert: We need a Linux sysadmin - UK / London preferred

We interrupt this blog to bring you an urgent vacancy we need to fill...

If this is you - or you know someone that you really rate and who fits the bill please get in touch.

£45000+ plus generous stock options

Linux / bind / exim / postfix / lightppd / Apache / RED5 / FMS / web 2.0 / video / streaming

Well-funded and fun web 2.0 start-up undergoing explosive growth requires a senior Linux systems administrator for their global web platform.

Ideally you will be based in London but - for the London role, remote working from other parts of the UK may be acceptable. Backing up the London role will be a less senior sysadmin role in San Francisco. Linux networking and Linux sysadmin, experience of bind, exim/postfix and lightppd (if not lightppd then Apache will be considered) if you also have postgresql you will be of even more interest and if you can add Django experience too you'll be snapped up in no time!

Experience of keeping 24/7 high-traffic commercial web systems afloat would be beneficial! The environment should be supporting hundreds of 1000's of users, 20,000 concurrent, within approx 5 months via a low-latency network mirrored with servers in the US and EU

Great opportunity to be in at the start of what is shaping up to be the next youtube or skype!

contact: Gerald Morgan - gerald@readypeople.eu or call 0870 89 66 900 now.

The EU, buy a designer banana for charity, being consistent and more...

Hi

It has been too long since my last post and I thought it was high time I remedied this. So here is an update on life at ReadyPeople towers...

Last week, not content with keeping up with UK employment law, I went straight to the epicentre of Euro-legislation - Brussels, for a day of updates on the state of the temporary and contract market and the legislative process across the EU. I was there courtesy of ATSCo - the Association of Technology Staffing Companies and, on balance it was a great day out! So what did I learn?

UK & Eire are still the very best place in Europe to be a temp or a contractor, 2nd only to the USA on a global scale.

The liberalization of employment practice that enables the UK & Eire to have such a dynamic flexible working environment is spreading, slowly, across the EU – particularly the accession states in Eastern Europe (Poland etc).

Eurociett – the European Confederation of Private Employment Agencies has a small dedicated unit in Brussels dedicated to representing recruitment businesses across Europe and fighting for appropriate liberalization of labour markers to repeat the success of the UK & Eire.

At this point in the presentation, the reporter for a well-known recruitment publication, who will remain nameless, fell into a sleep so deep that some other attendees at the conference were concerned that he had died. If you have persevered through this blog up to now – keep going - it does get a little better!

Lloyds TSB believe the EU economy is looking good for at least the next 3 years – this coupled with the gradual liberalization of the labour markets should mean more and better opportunities for all of us.

We were also given an insight into what everyone suspects about EU policy-making – it is slow, incredibly tedious and is apt to produce gems like this: (EC) 2257/94 stipulates that “bananas must be free from malformation or abnormal curvature and at least 5.5 inches long”. Bananas are classified into “compliant”, “slight defects of shape” and “defects of shape”. This took so long to agree that they ran out of time to define “abnormal curvature” – it has not been revisited in years.

(EC) 1677/88 is to cucumbers as EC 2257/94 is to bananas – but has gone 1 step further in managing to define abnormal curvature – class 1 and class 2 are allowed to curve by 10mm per 10cm of length – 20mm for 3rd class! It serves as a warning that legislation you think has got bogged down forever – can eventually emerge, years after it was first mooted.
I also learnt that coming back on Eurostar in a 1st-class carriage exclusively put on for a bunch of IT recruiters with unlimited alcohol is good fun and an excellent idea, at least until you try and use your sprained brain the following morning (!)

Back home again and my hometown team – Southend United, the Championship team that knocked Man-U out of the Carling Cup this season, have been relegated back to League One - it was a sad, but not entirely unexpected event. On the plus side – our season tickets are not being put up in price this year ;-). Shrimpers have had some magnificent games this year – but have shown a real lack of consistency. The same applies in recruitment – you may not always be able to turn in a superstar performance, but you do need to be consistently excellent – in order to stay up with the real star businesses – the ones that look after their clients & candidates while being ethical & profitable. At ReadyPeople, we are doing well at this, but we’re not complacent! I intend to keep ReadyPeople near the top of the table – and if any of our candidates or clients ever thinks we are on the verge of losing points - I am more than happy for you to give us “the hairdryer” in the changing rooms at half time!

Finally – for what I admit is a more random blog than usual – what on Earth is this “I am not a plastic bag” business about? First we have the stampede at Primark in Oxford Street – now we have £5 cotton shopping bags changing hands for £100’s on ebay! I was wondering if I could extend this magic process to the recruitment world – but have decided just to dip my toe into the water first…

So – this week only, in a desperate attempt to capitalise on my new-found EU banana knowledge - you can bid on ebay for my designer, organic, fair-trade banana – a real banana with the banana-skin slogan: “I am not a biscuit”. 50% of the sale will automatically go to Great Ormond Street Hospital; the other 50% will go into R&D for my next designer fruit and ultimate extension of this concept into my recruitment process “this is not a c-sharp developer” anyone?

Bid for my Banana: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/I-am-not-a-plastic-bag-style-organic-fairtrade-banana_W0QQitemZ300109899346QQihZ020QQcategoryZ60824QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

IT Contractors, 22% and Mr Fusion...

So... Gordon Brown has finished his triumphant budget speech, ending with a cut in the standard rate of income tax from 22% to 20% from next year - a tactic normally reserved for budgets before a general election, but welcome none-the-less.

However for an IT Contractor following the industry standard practice of working through their own ltd company, the news is less Rosy.

It has been well known that the government has been planning to crack down on various methods of legal tax avoidance - but today Brown announced an increase of 2% in the rate of Small Business Corporation tax (tax on profits of £50 to £300k per annum) from 20% to 22% by 2009. This measure has been specifically put in place to target individuals working through their own limited companies and to bring them more in line with those paid via PAYE but will affect ALL small businesses.

We pay IT contractors in a variety of ways depending on their preference with methods including full PAYE and the more standard method, in the IT world, of paying on receipt of their Ltd company invoices.

While we cannot hide from tax increases it is worth bearing in mind the still legal and effective schemes to help contractors claim back expenses, boosting their tax-free income. One company I work with to provide this service is Cash Simply, who have a product called "Gain Advantage" - I always offer this as an option to all new contractors.

Another possible way forward to this is an Umbrella company that seems to tick all the boxes for compliance called "Work 2 Live." I met Laura Beardsley at the last Recruiters Network event and remained sober enough to understand her business proposition :-)

For more info on Gain Advantage get in touch with me anytime. To check out what Laura's company can do to help - try www.work2live.co.uk

PS: - Gordon's stuck the rate of road tax up too - do any of you know how to run a petrol-engined car on recycled garden waste or will I have to wait for the "Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor" from Back to the Future?

Cheers
G

My inaugural ReadyPeople post!

Hello World!

Thought it was about time I got myself blogging…
As MD of ReadyPeople, when meeting potential new clients, I often try and explain how an SME-sized recruiter can compete with the “giants” out there. Nearly everything we do has come to us via recommendation - but this is still a point that is often raised. One of the key things I believe in and instill in the team, is that you must be an industry expert in your area - ReadyPeople only do IT Recruitment - but that is a broad church, and our recruiters need detailed knowledge of the sector and to have gained their own IT industry experience before I will consider working with them. So - apart from above average industry experience - what else differentiates a company like ours from the “mainstream”. One of the answers arrived in my inbox this morning - a copy of the latest Plimsoll report into recruitment (the article below is from Recruiter Magazine’s web site today) -

A group of lean, fit and relatively small companies are taking the recruitment industry by storm and showing the bigger players how it’s done, according to a report by business analysts Plimsoll Publishing.
It says these companies are reporting increasing sales at three times the rate of their larger competitors, are delivering four times the profitability, and are showing five times the return on investment.
Plimsoll says price deflation is hitting the bigger companies where it hurts – in their pockets. It found that at 19 of the top 200 recruitment agencies are losing money, while 30 are making less profit than last year. Salaries alone at the top 200 recruitment agencies eat up 13% of sales, in general they pay their staff more and are less productive, it found.
However, Plimsoll says the new kids on the block are nimbler, slicker and more efficient. Senior analyst, David Pattison, says: “19 of the bigger companies are displaying symptoms of extreme tiredness. But the big companies are desperate not to miss out on the new profit and growth areas, so they are busy hunting down the emerging firms.”


Hmmm… “the new kids on the block are nimbler, slicker and more efficient” - that will do for me
www.readypeople.eu

Well thats the end of my brief inaugural blog
thanks for taking a look
Gerald