Category Archives: Business & Money

Turbulent times in the airline industry

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Passengers won’t be the only ones checking on the location of emergency exits if the current stream of bad news in the airline industry continues. Shareholders could start to look for them too – because the outlook is distinctly bumpy.

Plans by Ryanair to take over smaller Irish rival Aer Lingus have been grounded by Europe’s competition authorities. It may appeal the judgment but rival Flybe, which stood to gain some of Aer Lingus’ slots at Gatwick, will still press ahead with job losses, cutting around 10% of its UK workforce as it fights to get back into the black. Continue reading →

Fake it till you make it

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Ageism is a fact of life in the work place. Once you get past 50 it’s way more difficult to find a job than it was at, say, 30. This isn’t necessarily because employers don’t like older people (though evidence suggests they don’t, they’re generally more expensive) but because there are also fewer senior roles around and most of the so-called ‘grey beards’ looking for work tend to have climbed some way up the corporate ladder. But young applicants present problems all of their own.

A friend of mine who works in HR tells me, however, she is fast becoming disillusioned with some young job-seekers she comes across. Why? Because there is so much embroidery, exaggeration and outright dishonesty in some of their CVs.

Continue reading →

Why does the gender gap still exist?

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The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report has found that although more women are in employment than ever before, major corporations are still not capitalising on their talents. Pay equality is not there either. So why are women still not equally represented in major multinational companies and, when they are, why aren’t they being paid equally?

The report shows much progress still being made but a lot of ground still to make up.

Its co-author Ricardo Hausmann, Director of the Centre for International Development at Harvard University, says countries have to adjust for the fact that marriage and motherhood are not at odds with women’s advancement in the workplace. Continue reading →

Industry awards, the kiss of death

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So, how to tell in advance which banks and financial institutions are headed towards the door marked ‘exit’?

City analysts like to pore over spreadsheets, corporate accounts and chief executive comments for nuances and clues as to performance.

I prefer to keep things simple. I used to reckon that any FTSE company which had (1) flagpoles outside its HQ; (2) a country-house training centre; and (3) a corporate helicopter, was probably in trouble. Nowadays, however, I study lists of winners at industry award shindigs because, almost by tradition, they’re seen as the ‘kiss of death’.

icesave11Take Icesave. Its website was, until earlier this week, proudly boasting of its victories in two categories at the Moneyfacts personal finance awards 2008, which judged performance over the previous year.

“Best monthly interest account provider” and “best no-notice internet account provider”. Tough fought categories, no doubt. But I hesitate to suggest that Moneyfacts’ definition of ‘no-notice’ probably wasn’t a reference to the amount of time savers had to withdraw their funds before the bank hit the rocks.

Moneyfacts analyst Michelle Slade says they don’t publish the full judging criteria, to prevent product providers from manipulating the results. And she reckons, with some understatement, that the 2009 Moneyfacts awards will be “interesting”.

“Well, for one thing, providers have to have been there for the full year to qualify for the awards. I think it’s going to be very different next year.”

One industry shindig where the ‘kiss of death’ tag is probably well deserved, though for the organiser rather than the award recipients, is the Bradford & Bingley Personal Finance Media Awards.

Usually held in October, gongs go to personal finance journalists who are deemed to have excelled in the previous year – perhaps this time they’d go to those hacks who predicted the demise of some of the High Street’s great names like, er, Bradford & Bingley?

Chance would be a fine thing, however. It seems that prospects for this year’s awards do, which would have been the 22nd annual bash, are not that great. A B&B spokeswoman is non-committal: “It’s all under review,” she tells me. “There will be a decision in the next couple of days. The awards might not take place in their current format,” she says. No kidding.

This article appeared on the Reuters.co.uk website in October 2008.