If the latest survey from global recruiting company Kelly Services is to be believed, almost half of UK workers think they’ve made the wrong career and study choices.

Many of those who took the survey thought that their education hadn’t properly prepared them for future employment and one in five felt that they had chosen the wrong career.

As a young person considers their options after school, university is often cited as the only logical thing to do. Degree choices are then susceptible to becoming, merely, extensions of a favourite subject at school. Each year almost 100,000 people quit university before the end of the first year.

The University of Bolton has the highest drop-out rate of any further education institution in the country. Thirty eight per cent of students from there, according to figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, who started their degrees in 2005 will quit. The average university drop-out rate in England and Wales is 22%.

Perhaps, one way of preventing instances of a degree/career mismatch is to have more vocationally orientated A levels, training courses or apprenticeships that give students a taste of what to expect from their future that would, at the same time, point them towards a more rewarding career.

[pic courtesy of leoscholars]

We’ve all been tempted once in a while as that Monday morning alarm goes off - ah the joys of phoning in sick! What’s not to like about getting up at midday and spending some quality time in front of Bargain Hunt and Jeremy Kyle? I’ve been told that hanging your head over the bottom of the bed while on the phone creates quite a good croak.

There’s a website out there that’s making things a whole lot easier for anyone thinking of phoning in sick. Doctorsnotestore.com, is selling all sorts of sick notes on NHS headed paper with real doctors names that are completely false. They cost as little as £25 and can be delivered the next day.

Sites like these have been around for a few years but it’s only now that they’re being targeted at the UK market, specifically. American sites like Best fake doctor notes, with the company tagline:

you too can get sick today!

offers counterfeit jury letters, chiropractor and dental notes all for the bargain price of $15.

Doctorsnotestore.com can also provide documents in the style of any UK private medical centre. Although slightly worrying considering our sickness benefit statistics in the UK, part of me admires the entrepreneurial spirit of the site’s creators in spotting an opportune gap in the market.

The UK currently has one of the highest proportions of people on incapacity benefit in Europe after numbers have more than trebled since the 1970’s to 2.7 m and it’s predicted that long term unemployment due to ill health costs the tax payer more than £7 billion a year.

Back in February this year, health secretary Alan Johnson called for doctors to take a lead in tackling the problem by issuing “well notes” rather than automatically signing someone off as being ineligible to work. Dame Carol Black the National Director for Health and Work, has previously told BBC news, that she is looking at the issue.

[pic courtesy of Mister Rad]

According survey by professional networking site LinkedIn, 47 % of us are mixing our social and professional lives online by inadvertedly accepting colleagues as friends and these “Frolleague” hybrids are causing problems. The site is set to launch guidelines for users who are confused about how to balance work and networks.

The survey found that 36 % of their users felt an obligation to accept friend requests from colleagues with 73 % saying they wanted to keep them separated. LinkedIn currently has over one million registered UK users.

If you don’t want to make your page private you can at least make the photos private, yourself unsearchable and can I just say thank god for de-tagging. It’s priceless when it comes to getting rid of those bleary-eyed-drunk photos from three in the morning.

The general rule that LinkedIn is advocating here is that unless you know your colleague socially outside of work, you shouldn’t add them to your contact list.

It’s easy in theory but a bit trickier in reality. You effectively have to shun their olive branch of friendship without insulting them.

I think the easiest thing to do is to just imagine your boss is online when you’re uploading photos and chewing the fat with your friends about last night’s shenanigans. Imagine the photos could be seen on the office white board. Would that be so bad?

In one form or another we’ve all got reputations to uphold; it’s just that our professional ones are that little bit more fragile.

LinkedIn have yet to release the exact details of their findings. We’ll keep you posted.

The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody’s gonna go to school today
She’s gonna make them stay at home…

Guess the song…

Those Boom Town Rats guys got it wrong. Monday’s not the most hated day of the week. The much maligned Monday can step down.

A study carried out by the University of Sydney found that the most hated day of the week was Wednesday.

I don’t know how much I agree with this but here goes.

Over five hundred people were questioned in the study and apparently Wednesday is when our mood gets lowest throughout the week. It’s at that particular point in the week where it seems like a long time since the weekend and an age until the next one rolls around. Plus it’s also the day when we have the highest workload.

Who would’ve thought it..those Wednesday blues.

Just as I was typing this post it occurred to me that it tied in nicely with a litte blog we did a while back on how Wednesday was the best day to bag yourself a new job, coincidence?!

A survey recently carried out by Workingmums.co.uk, a jobs board for working mothers found that mothers are frustrated by the lack of flexible employment options.

Seventy three percent of mums questioned felt the biggest barrier to returning to work was the lack of flexible working hours and eighty six percent of those surveyed would like some sort of flexibility. Sixteen percent said they were denied flexible working hours after they had children.

Strange, considering that women who’ve had children are excellent at managing their time, good at prioritizing and have great negotiation techniques. There’s nothing like a two year old having a tantrum to really fine tune those skills.

Things are not entirely bleak, however. Thirty one percent were granted the flexibility they requested. Just over a quarter, twenty six percent, of mums settled for a compromise.

I was chatting to a friend of mine the other night, who shall remain nameless. She was telling me about all the wonderful things she includes in her CV. It’s a CV that’s almost a work of fiction.

“They expect you to lie on your CV!” Companies look at your CV and think “is that all you can come up with even after lying?”

Do they really elaborate? - yeah. Exaggerate? - maybe. It’s a tricky field to navigate, but lie? You’d think not but it happens more than you think.

For those of you who missed it, (and there were only a few because viewing figures tipped the 10 million mark) thirty three year old Lee McQueen, a recruitment sales manager from Buckingham, was crowned Sir Alan Sugar’s latest Apprentice last night.

It was Bordan Tkachuk, the CEO of Viglen, who caught Lee out in the final interview stage. Lee claimed he’d spent two years at Thames Valley University whereas he was only there for 4 months. As much as CV-gate (as I like to call it) shows the recruitment industry in a bad light it’ll make interviewers more aware of little CV foibles for the next few months.

Suffice to say, Lee admitted his mistake, managed to turn things around and win in the end. It was probably based on a niggling insecurity more than anything and he had the business acumen to carry him forward anyway. Now with a new job that pays £100,000 a year I’m sure his girlfriend will be delighted with her fancy new shoes. He’ll just have to make do with a Porsche.

It’s not just Sir Alan Sugar, or ‘The Shug’ as we like to call him, who uses, arguable over-uses, this catch phrase. There’s unfortunate and not-so unfortunate employees up and down the country who face a career change with these immortal words.

Fortunately, the Internet provides a way for these newly-made job seekers to share their tales of woe. So, if you’re having a bad day at work, or you’re a boss whose team is giving you gip, check out Simply Fired, which gives readers a chance to rate the best firing stories submitted. There’s also the simpler, stream of fired bloggage at firedworkers.com.

It’s not all bad news though, sometimes getting fired can be just the push that’s needed to get a career started.

Got a funny story about getting the sack? Dropped a right clanger that saw you move to your next role? Leave a comment below and let us know your experiences. Feel free to be anonymous.

Far be it from us to encourage bad behaviour at work. Stop reading this now and get back to work…or maybe search Chinwag Jobs for something new and exciting?!

Update: From @mattalder (via Twitter) - not updated for ages but along the same lines www.iworkwithfools.com

Chinwag can be a tricky beast to define at the best of times. Having grown up from an email-based community, the company is evolving alongside and with the help of the community.

In February, I was invited to speak at Enhance Media’s annual conference, The Year Ahead in Online Recruitment looking at the lessons learnt, and still being learnt, from building Chinwag Jobs. As our team begun to think about transforming a basic email list into an all-singing, all-dancing jobs website, we aimed to keep the community at the heart of the development.

As always, these presentations fly by in the blink of an eye. Fortunately, the lovely Louise Triance from UK Recruiter managed to grab some notes, which she’s posted up her blog. If you want a bit of insight into the background to Chinwag Jobs and how we try and keep the community at the heart of our development, have a read.

Comments, as always, are welcome, as are suggestions for any of Chinwag’s activities: Chinwag Jobs, Chinwag.com and Chinwag Live.

By Harry Fowler - Group Digital Recruiter for AMV Group

I think we can all agree that the finance markets around the world are not exactly stable at the moment and whatever happens in those markets will have an effect on the digital, advertising and communications sectors.

So with that in mind, where does this leave the digital market and more importantly where does this leave recruitment as we move forward?

I’m not wanting to talk us into a recession - but I remember the gaping holes that were left in the industry from the previous meltdown - very few people being hired, everyone struggling to keep their heads above water and PM’s working for £30k or less in some instances just to pay the mortgage! (I know, £30k for a PM - and a bloody good one at that!)

Now the knock on affect from that was felt sometime later when trying to find candidates with 1-2, 1-3 years experience. They were few and very far between and of course supply and demand drives the price.

So are we strong enough to ride out the storm? Yes, I believe we are - but be very wary.  If the market does take a wobble please don’t resort to the traditional tactics of cutting back on the service levels to your clients, getting rid of juniors and cutting out graduate hire. The industry continually needs new blood.

Keep feeding it please.

A recent piece of research by Bristol based Recruitment Consultancy Just Adlib has probed into our happiness levels at work with illuminating results. An interesting read, the research was conducted by people living in the west of England and working in the Digital, Marketing, Advertising and Creative Industries.

Just Adlib found that, 37% of participants said job satsifaction was the most important factor to ensure their happiness at work, closely followed by the people they worked with (17%) and a nice environment to work in (12%). Surprisingly being well paid only accounted for 5% of the responses and additional benefits only 1%.

I can’t help but wonder if the results would differ if respondants were asked the same thing in London or Manchester? I suppose there’s one way to find that out!