It is thought that some 500,000 temporary employment contracts could be terminated due to the Agency Worker Regulations (AWR) coming into force in October.
Work by Allen & Overy reveals that 33% of medium to large UK businesses might avoid increased costs by terminating agency worker contracts before the 1st October when the 12-week qualifying period for equal pay and benefits starts.
A technology firm has recently moved to Widnes and hopes to create more than 10 new jobs in the process.
Wireless systems integrator Aerelink has moved its entire operation and employee base to Turnstone Business Park in Widnes.
Managing director Steve Swift said: “The support infrastructure in the region couples with the need for significant additional space were important factors in our decision to relocate.
“This is a positive and exciting step for the company and we believe we are now in an ideal environment to grow further.”
Aerelink specialises in the design and delivery of bespoke wireless communications and engineering services to local authorities, police forces, healthcare and companies in the mobile and telecommuncations industry.
The company has ambitious plans for further growth, expected to reach £5 million over the next three years. There may be more jobs to come!
Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.
Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).
As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)
Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.
To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year.
Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.
Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: Get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.
Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.
While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers.
Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house that he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.
Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.
You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often.
Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.
Digital innovation boosted by a new £150 million fund aiming to ensure that the country becomes a world leader in terms of technology jobs.
Pledging to create an ideal environment in which hi-tech companies are able to thrive over the coming years, Gordon Brown revealed that the public sector investment will be supplemented by up to £1 billion worth of private sector funding in fields such as life sciences, biotechnology and digital manufacturing.
The prime minister also expressed confidence that as much as £100 billion will be ploughed into the UK’s burgeoning green energy sector, with more than 400,000 new jobs in the construction and engineering sectors alone set to be created as a result.
“And we believe investment by government and the private sector will enable the economy to create, over the next five years, 1.5 million new skilled jobs in Britain.”
Is this too little too late?
When I sit at work I have literally hundreds of distractions, conversations, phone calls, emails, forwarded emails, spam emails, instant messenger, jabber, blog alerts, bbc news alerts, team members, post and even the sandwich man! What sort of productivity could you expect if you took away these distractions?
Best Served Cold, the people that built uktemps are attempting to build an entire web application in a weekend! The company is made up primarily of two key developers, one of which will be building the backend systems and database, whilst the other developer will be dealing with the front end XHTML and design work.
Their idea is to build a modern web design showcase, being inspired by spending a lot of time looking around CSS showcase sites for inspiration and new ideas, however, the sites in question seem to have stood still whilst other websites have surged forwards with their technology and up to date designs.
The biggest issue in building this new site will be their time! Whenever they try to dedicate any, they end up getting distracted with work for clients and everything listed above unfortunately, it means that they never quite get stuck in and the ideas get shelved.
Solution? Take a weekend out, turn the phones off, ignore email and dedicate 12 hours a day for both days building an MVC based web application!
Click here to find out how 101 best websites develops over the weekend.
