Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced that it will spend an extra £1bn with UK suppliers over the next four years, a direct result of the popularity of the new Range Rover Evoque.

The investment is on top of the £2bn worth of supply contracts it has already awarded to over 40 UK parts suppliers, which it announced a year ago.

JLR clearly took a cautious view of demand for the Evoque’s when it began production last year at its Halewood plant, in Merseyside. It thought it might have a smash-hit on its hands, but it refused to commit to an expensive expansion until it was sure the demand was there. However, actual orders have surpassed even JLR’s most ambitious expectations.

The Evoque has been a spectacular success since its launch in September 2011. The new model has been particularly popular in overseas markets and in total over 60,000 cars have been sold so far.

The success of the Evoque meant that JLR has already previously announced 1,000 new jobs at its Halewood plant. The plant now operates 24 hours a day and will employ 4,500 people - three times the workforce employed there in 2009.

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Jenrick IT (Specialist IT Recruitment consultancy) is reporting an increase in clients who are working proactively with the recruiter to define the ’soft skills’ required, as Philip Fanthom, Managing Director at Jenrick IT comments:

“We have focused on this part of the recruitment process for a number of years. Often when recruiting for technical experts; employers and recruiters neglect the personality ‘type’ required to successfully add value.

We have been advising our clients and conducting interview coaching workshops to assist with clearly identifying what non-technical skills are vital to the success of the teams and the organisation.

Jenrick IT offer job description authoring services as a complimentary value add. This is a service which quite a few of our client partners have trialled and enjoyed the results”

Inc.com have reported on what some clients look for, when on boarding talent:

Great employees are reliable, dependable, proactive, diligent, great leaders and great followers… they possess a wide range of easily-defined-but hard to find-qualities.

A few hit the next level. Some employees are remarkable, possessing qualities that may not appear on performance appraisals but nonetheless make a major impact on performance.

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Weetabix offers the Shanghai-based Bright Food company heritage and access to European markets with the potential for growth in Asia, according to analysts.

British cereal favourite Weetabix is to come under Chinese ownership after a deal involving the Asian country’s biggest overseas food takeover.

Shanghai firm Bright Food will take a majority 60% share of the Weetabix Food Company, placing a £1.2 billion value on the cereal giant, while current private equity owner Lion Capital will retain a 40% stake.

The deal values Weetabix, which is produced in the small town of Burton Latimer, near Kettering, Northamptonshire, at £1.2bn.

Northampton-based Weetabix, which also owns Alpen and Ready Brek, was founded in 1932 and was family owned until 2004 when it was bought by a Texan private equity firm.

State-backed Bright Food, which generated revenues of around £7.5 billion last year, is looking to take advantage of China’s “growing appetite” for healthy foods and to drive Weetabix’s growth across Asia.

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The UK’s £12.5 billion renewables industry, which currently supports around 110,000 jobs, could support 400,000 by 2020 and be worth some £50 billion, according to REA and Innovas.

The report, Renewable Energy: Made in Britain, from the Renewable Energy Association (REA) and Innovas is the first to bring together turnover and employment figures for the entire renewables supply chain.

Since 2009/10, the sector has increased by 11% in market value, well outstripping the overall economic growth rate of 1.4% during the same period.

The report says that meeting the UK’s renewable energy targets by 2020 will displace fossil fuels worth £60 billion, most of which are imported into the UK, giving a significant boost to the country’s trade balance.

“Harnessing our renewables creates employment and means that rather than spending money on energy imports we can keep it circulating in the UK economy,” explains REA chief executive Gaynor Hartnell.

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Historically the perceptions of the food industry have often been considered to be an undesirable sector, with popular views that jobs in the industry have no prospects and are poorly paid.

However, according to the Harris Barometer Survey conducted by the Food and Drink Federation (FDF), 45% of the people agreed that a career in the UK food manufacturing industry offers stable and secure employment.

The survey results also revealed that a further 40% of the people noted that food manufacturing industry provides promising career prospects.

The survey, which was conducted in Spring 2012, involved 1100 people.

FDF Director of Competiveness Angela Coleshill said that FDF is pleased with these findings as it reveals that the industry is an exciting and stable sector to work in.

“We employ some of the most innovative people and with a variety of roles from creating, developing, researching and marketing new products - the food industry is a great place to work,” Coleshill added.

“We are extremely pleased with these findings as it demonstrates that the industry is an exciting and stable sector to work in.

As part of the FDF’s 20/20 vision for growth, we have acknowledged that one of the key challenges is to deliver a sustainable growth of 20% by 2020 - by attracting the best talent to our industry.  We hope these findings provide skeptical individuals that this industry really is a challenging, rewarding and exciting sector to be in”.

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On April 18th 2012 the first ‘Forces to Business Career Transition Workshop’ was hosted by award-winning Recruitment Consultancy Jenrick IT.

The workshop, which was free to attend, was attended by a number of British Armed Forces personnel who have recently left, or are in the process of leaving the Armed Forces and are now seeking to explore the next chapter of their career in the Private Sector.

The all-day event was held at Jenrick’s historical ‘Clock Tower’ Head Office, in Walton on Thames, Surrey and was orientated around two interactive talks from ex-Forces personnel who have already made successful career transitions to the Private Sector.

Miriam Lee, a Government and Defence careers specialist at Jenrick IT, explained why the team ran this event:

“Our company was invited to attend several Defence Exhibitions in 2011 to act as a career and recruitment advisor to those leaving the Forces. It became quickly apparent that there were a number of information gaps regarding how the skills of Armed Forces personnel would transfer into the Private Sector and what the Private Sector was seeking in terms of skills.

The workshop was an ideal opportunity to help fill in those information gaps and equip the attendees with the skills they will need to succeed in the Private Sector.”

John Botterill and Andy Hayward, both of whom have built extremely successful careers since leaving the Armed Forces, led the morning workshop sessions. They covered a variety of topics, which were orientated around how they felt when they left the Forces, the mistakes they made in their job hunting approach and how they applied these lessons to refine their job hunting.

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Jenrick IT are keeping a close monitor on any potential changes to the IR35 legislation and will be reporting in the weeks ahead. George Osbourne appears to have his sights set on Limited Company contractors as a revenue earner for the exchequer.

George Osborne used his Budget 2012, delivered earlier today, to address the avoidance of tax through the use of personal service companies (PSCs), in line with industry predictions issued exclusively to CUK.

The chancellor’s full report states that the government will introduce a package of measures with two broad aims - to tackle avoidance via PSCs and to make IR35 easier for “genuinely in business” PSC users to understand.

Rather than representing a new stance on the issue, the announcement by Mr Osborne is merely a reiteration of government policy, under which the IR35 Forum is preparing new measures to achieve the two stated goals by April 6^th.

According to the chancellor’s report, the incoming package to tackle tax avoidance through PSCs includes ways to simplify how “IR35 is administered” - the very mission statement of the IR35 Forum.

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IT developer skills is one of the key permanent staff skills that were reported as being in short supply last month, according to the latest Report on Jobs from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and KPMG.

General IT skills and those in CAD and CAM were also cited as areas of skills shortage in permanent jobs, while general IT and business analyst skills were in short supply among contractors.

Overall, the report for March 2012 showed that the IT and computing sector led an upturn in permanent job vacancy growth to an eight-month high.

Ronnie McCombe, partner at KPMG, said:

“It’s encouraging to see permanent placements in positive territory for the third month in a row in 2012, albeit slightly down on last month’s high. This provides further hope that the employment market will win through to a stronger recovery as the year progresses.

“Sectors such as IT and computing and engineering and construction continue to perform well.”

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The growth in job vacancies in the UK reached an eight-month high in March, according to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and KPMG Report on Jobs, which was released today.

This growth was led by the IT and Computing sector, while the Engineering and Construction sector also performed well.

Recruitment consultants also reported a rise in permanent staff placements for the third month in a row, although the growth slowed from the nine-month high seen in February.

Short-term appointments showed a moderate decrease, with many employers choosing to convert temporary/contract staff into permanent employees. This may be due to the effect of the Agency Worker Regulations, which mean that agency workers now have the same rights as directly employed staff after spending 12 weeks in a job.

Meanwhile the growth of permanent staff availability slowed further in March and temporary/contract staff availability rose at the weakest rate recorded since August 2011.

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THE North West remains the powerhouse of the UK’s manufacturing sector and an increasingly critical factor in the region’s economic growth, according to new statistics today from manufacturing organisation EEF.

They show the manufacturing sector employs about 315,000 people in the region and is worth £16bn to the economy, almost 13% of the UK’s overall manufacturing output. It also accounts for 11% of the North West regional economy.

The growth is being driven by a broad spectrum of manufacturing companies in the region, from food and drink to healthcare, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, as well as the aerospace and automotive sectors which have a major bearing on the supply chain and have seen significant investment.

Growth is also being driven largely by manufacturing exports which have increased by 34% in the past five years, especially to emerging economies such as Brazil, Russia, India and China.

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