CareersPartnershipUK - Profile

Hi All

Am fully retiring very shortly (yippee!) and so want to find someone to replace me as Careers Advisor on another company's web site.  I'm wondering whether any MLS members could do - and would want - this "job"? 

From memory there's at least one other careers company within our group.  

The "job" entails writing fairly short answers (eg 3 paragraphs) to a fairly wide range of adult enquirers' career and job questions.  Most questions can be answered without doing any research by anyone with good knowledge of issues to do with careers development, vocational education, recruitment and resolving employment problems.  It's not a time-consuming role; in an average month there may be no more than two or three enquiries.  When offering advice it's very important to be supportive and constructive - many enquirers feel they won't be able to find a decent job as they can only work part-time and locally.

The main attractions of this "job" for me have been the web link to my own site from a site visited by one of my target audiences and their advisors and the PR opportunity involved in being a guru for that target audience.  I doubt whether the "job" has directly gained me any clients.  I've enjoyed my contact with the efficient and realistic individual sending me the enquiries.

If you're interested in this "job" - or can think of somebody who would be - could you send me an email for more details?  Most of the people I know in the careers world are at about the same age as me so they're not going to be interested in taking on any new professional responsibilities!

I'd like anyone interested in the "job" to tackle two fairly representative enquiries before I put their details forward.  As I've already said, if you've the right background answering these enquiries doesn't take long.   

I was one of the whingers ... amongst other failings I was rude enough to politely ask people smoking in the coach seat next to me whether they could stop for a bit as I'd had eye surgery the day before and the smoke was hurting my eyes.  I was wearing a surgical eye patch at the time. These smokers ignored my request.

The no smoking law couldn't come in fast enough for me!

The truly scary thing is that it's far, far cheaper for the state to collect pension contributions and pay out pensions than to rely on private pension providers doing the same thing.  

If we can't afford for the state to do this, then the only other option we have is to accept most future OAPs won't be able to afford to eat, heat their homes or pay for basic home maintenance.  Many families won't have enough "spare" money to subsidise their "wrinklies" even if they wanted to; so what happens then?

The pensions auto-enrolment project was designed to safeguard future "wrinklies" from a dire, poverty-stricken old age.  What I've seen in the financial press suggests it won't work because too few people are themselves earning enough money in permanent jobs to pay in adequate contributions for an adequate length of time; and the contribution made by their employers is too low to make up the deficit.    

Barney (and anyone else technically minded Who Knows) - what's happening plse on the battery front (development of affordable batteries for home storage of electricity generated from solar panels)?  Clearly, if we could store and use after dark the electricity generated from solar panels then we wouldn't need to build (as many?) new power stations and might be able to avoid building nuclear ones.    

"I still don't understand why all new building don't have them automatically fitted"

Agree - new homes and public sector new build certainly should have solar panels fitted (with storage batteries) as standard AND there should be a small but sufficient incentive for private sector businesses to do the same.  

We're already experiencing climate change that's difficult to manage; and we've only got about 20 years before we reach the estimated tipping point when nobody knows whether we'll be able to rescue our world.  Twenty years is a ridiculously short amount of time in which to bring about world change, particularly as most current trends (eg increasing industrialisation and energy use) will lead to even more climate change.  

... Or how about us just telling the EU we think they've made the wrong decision on this ?

Thanks for that info, Steve.  

You'd have thought Microsoft would have contacted Norton over its new "baby" beforehand, there've been so many earlier niggles about incompatibilities.  

The cheapest, safest way to fund pensions people can afford to retire on is through the basic State Retirement Pension.  That option scares the hell out of the politicians because it means raising taxes now to safeguard everyone's future.

Not sure of my "facts" here but I think I'm right ...  I remember reading that if Maggie Thatcher had left the pension scheme in as good a state as it was when she got elected, the State Pension would now be generous enough to do without paying anyone means-tested Pension Credits!  About a third of today's pensioners are dependent on the means-tested Pension Credit, I believe.