Halloween marks the end of October and the end of another positive and busy month at Escape. With new members of our team flourishing, new industry regulations coming into force and a change in season here’s an update on what we’ve been up to in the last four weeks.

Trends

With a mix of good news and bad this month you could be forgiven for wondering if the economy and the Scottish job market were doing well or not.

For example we learned from The Office for National Statistics (ONS) that the number of unemployed in Scotland in the previous quarter had risen by 7,000 (bad news) whilst labour market statistics informed us that employment had increased by 20,000 over the year and the Scottish Government described statistics as showing “that the Scottish labour market continued to outperform the UK as a whole, with lower unemployment, higher employment and lower economic inactivity rates” (good news). We also heard that the number claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance fell by 200 in September (fair to say this is still on the side of good news, if only just!)

What have Escape experienced this month?
We’ve continued to be busy across all our industry divisions especially from many of our long standing clients operating within Scotland’s Engineering and Oil & Gas sectors. We also remain positive for the months ahead with strong pipelines and forecasts showing that many of Scotland’s companies are still in growth and job markets continue to be buoyant.

Scottish Leadership Awards 2011

Escape hosted a table at this years Scottish Leadership Awards 2011 gala dinner National Museum of Scotland.

Hosted by Stephen Jardine, Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller DCB, former head of MI5 gave a very well received leadership lecture to the audience.

As our colleague said:

“There have been many criticisms made of our Leaders but last night proved that Scotland has the talent and capability that produces globally competitive businesses led by world class individuals.”

Congratulations again to all the well-deserved winners!

New Legislation…(and leaks about potential legislation!)

October saw the launch of the much talked about Agency Worker Regulations (AWR). The first Qualifying Clock started on the 1^st October and Escape have continued to support existing and new hirers and agency workers understand what this means for them as we head towards the end of the first Qualifying Period on Christmas Eve!

Thanks to the Daily Telegraph we also saw the leaked Beecroft Report which challenged existing unfair dismissal regulations and generated headlines such as “Give firms freedom to sack their slackers”.

‎IIP Reaccreditation

We were also delighted to pass our Investors in People Reaccreditation following a series of interviews with a cross section of our team earlier this month. We look forward to reading our full report but were thrilled to hear that the assessors felt in their experience we are and I quote ‘an outstanding example’ of a company making every effort to work to the best of business standards.

End of Summer…bring on the snow!

With the official end of British Summer Time last weekend our mind starts to think about the Winter of 2010-2011 and of course the snow! Escape have been working on ensuring our teams, clients and candidates, can keep working throughout this winter should the snow hit Scotland again!

Read our jobseekers blog on Looking for Jobs in the Snow