BondWilliams

As companies’ use of cloud computing becomes more and more common, more job titles are opening up in the IT sector as firms look to hire professionals to focus on and oversee complete cloud strategies.

Job titles that have been created because of this move in business include ‘Cloud Transformation Officer’ and ‘Director of Cloud Transformation’.

Global industry lead in technology recruitment, Al Delattre, commented:

“This position is like being a conductor of an orchestra. It’s a series of 500 projects over seven years. You have to make sure it works and it’s sequenced.”

The IT industry and jobs market are also continuing to grow due to the developments in mobile computing and social media leading to new job positions specific to these. Roles such as ‘Social Media Strategist’ and ‘New Media Coordinator’ are expected to become more widespread as companies focus more on increasing ambitious social media projects.

Carlsberg, BT and The Police Service of Northern Ireland will offer practical advice at the CIPD Well-being for High Performance Conference & Workshop 23-24 February, London.

The ability of employee well-being programmes to drive organisation performance and success is well documented. But, in an increasingly competitive environment, an organisation’s ability to adapt and grow is also crucial to success, and this brings with it stresses and strains that can harm well-being, creating a vicious circle that can be hard to escape. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) Well-being for High Performance Conference and Workshop will provide the practical guidance needed to allow HR professionals and managers to develop wellbeing programmes that can break that circle and drive organisations forward.

The conference opens with an introduction from Wendy Cartwright, Head of HR, Olympic Delivery Authority. Expert speakers will then offer insights into how a healthy organisation functions, exploring the link between employee well-being and increased employee productivity, resilience and engagement, resulting in improved business performance. They will also demonstrate how important it is for an organisation to communicate its well-being strategy, to not only gain the appropriate commitment from senior leadership, but also the buy-in from all employees.

Afternoon sessions will look into the issues of workplace well-being:

- Managing and mitigating stress and mental health in the workplace – understanding the impact of job insecurity, increasing awareness of stress and mental health and reducing the cost of presenteeism. (Catherine Kilfedder, Group Health Advisor, BT)

- Building resilience and managing change in the workplace – the business case for resilience and how to develop it. (David Miller, CEO, Changefirst)

- Embedding well-being into the organisational culture – defining and embedding the well-being approach and ensuring long-term sustainability. (Gary Tideswell, Director of Wellbeing Safety and Health, University of Leeds.)

The second day will be a workshop on Managing Absence in the Workplace. Mike Payne, Director, Benson Payne Ltd, will help HR practitioners and line managers to develop and perfect the skills needed to tackle sickness absence and move from policy to practice effectively. He will go through practical exercises and offer tools and techniques, which will help practitioners to create a clear and robust absence management policy.

Ben Willmott, Head of Public Policy, CIPD, says: “The business case for employers investing in the well-being of their staff is extremely clear in terms of reduced levels of employee ill health and absence, as well as lower risk of accidents, fewer tribunal claims and increased employee engagement and productivity. The starting point for building employee well-being and resilience is how people are led and managed on a day-to-day basis. Employers also need to ensure that they have effective systems for identifying and managing absence and provide support such as access to occupational health and flexible working where appropriate.”

The Annual Barometer report published by the CIPD last week predicts the number of people in employment in the UK to fall by 120,000 this year despite a further pay squeeze and a continued ‘productivity pause’.

Unemployment figures are estimated to reach 2.85 million (8.8%) by the end of 2012 – the highest number of unemployed since 1994 and the highest unemployment rate since 1995 when it was 8.8%. This would be the first time that unemployment will have been this high and rising since 1991, during the country’s last recession.

It is thought that Government initiatives targeted at young unemployed people and long-term welfare benefit recipients will reduce headline young unemployment to 0.92 million and contain long-term unemployment below 0.9 million, but have no effect on overall unemployment numbers for 2012.

The number of unemployed is forecasted to rise further still at the beginning of 2013, to a peak of 2.9 million, before falling back to a rate of 8.8% by the end of 2013.

The Annual Barometer also anticipates the annual rate of economic growth to remain below 2% for the next 2 years. Along with returning to faster growth in productivity, this will moderate the pace of jobs recovery and prevent unemployment from falling below 2.5 before 2015.

If the CIPD forecast is accurate, there is still a long stretch ahead before unemployment figures begin to look confidently positive.

CIPD Chief Economic Adviser Dr John Philpott has commented on the Barometer predictions:

“As long as there is a relatively benign outcome to the eurozone crisis we expect the 2012 jobs recession to be milder than that suffered in 2008-9. But unemployment in the coming year will be rising from a much higher starting point, so the UK jobs market in 2012 will be weaker than at any time since the recession of the early 1990s. The combination of worsening job shortages for people without work, mounting job insecurity and a further fall in real earnings for those in work may test the resilience and resolve of the UK workforce far more than it did in the recession of 2008-9, and foster a tetchy ‘passive-aggressive’ mood in many workplaces that could prove very hard to manage.

“The forecast is not as gloomy as it might be in a near stagnant economy since CIPD surveys of employers as yet detect no sign of an imminent widespread surge in private sector redundancies, though that remains a serious risk given the fragile state of business confidence. However, at some point private sector businesses will need to raise labour productivity back to more normal levels. If, as we currently forecast, the productivity pause isn’t brought to an end by a much higher rate of redundancies in 2012, employers will inevitably be slow to recruit staff when the economy eventually picks up. The flipside of a mild jobs recession in 2012 is a mild jobs recovery in subsequent years and a correspondingly longer wait until unemployment starts to fall.”