Times Best Council to Work for 2008
It has been released…
For many your work, career choice, work aspirations help to define you as a person. It’s always interesting to find out how organisations compare to aspects of your work life that interest you. Is it training, wellness, a work/home balance or flexible working that tips the scales in which council interests you?
Times Online in association with the Improvement and Development Agency and Local Government Employers Association have just released their Best Councils to Work for 2008 list.
Councils are ranked on their flexible working, sabbatical or career breaks, wellness, charity work (for staff) and women in senior management. The survey has heavy input from employees with over 48,000 survey been distributed to participating councils and to be eligible, a council has to return at least 30% of these.
Best Council to Work for 2008 website
Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA)
We blogged about the 2007 Best Council to Work for.
JGP innovation alive and squealing
Innovative, fast paced and intensifying are the three key words I would use to describe the e-recruitment industry JGP currently live in. In an effort to promote and strengthen creative thinking within the company JGP has fashioned its own forum for inventive thinking – The Piggy Pen.
The result of an innovation meeting some months ago the Piggy Pen idea has been developed and turned into a live showcase by Dan Taylor-Edwards and Richard Lawson. On a monthly basis willing JGP contestants are invited to present their innovative ideas to a live studio audience with the most inventive, crowd pleasing contender walking away with £150 to invest in their idea and more importantly the title of Piggy Master.
Episode One of the Piggy Pen burst onto Back Church Lane on the 1st of August, with Sofie, Matt and Maddie bravely navigating untouched stage space. After a 60 second pitch from each contestant and a thorough intellectual cavity search from the Piggy Panel, Matt Jacobs rose to the top with his idea for improving workplace recreational time, booking himself a place in the JGP hall of fame alongside the original sandwich man – Diego. Sofie and Maddie were left to contemplate the reality of life in the sty and committed to the dusty JGP archives.
The 5th of September saw the Piggy Pen juggernaut role back into town for the much anticipated Episode Two. Like the sequel to a romantic first date all involved realised things would need to improve to avoid uncomfortable silence and ultimate capitulation. Episode Two did not disappoint; outstanding pitches captivated the audience and withstood the panel’s assessment, leaving it in the hands of the fickle mob. Andrew Wilkinson won the currency with his idea for boosting the library resources of an inner city primary school. Wilko fought off tough challenges from Ben Goodacre trying to promote workplace photography and Dan Shewan promoting workplace violence.
So it is safe to say, for now anyway, that the spirit of creativity that has helped shape JGP over the last 10 years is still alive and well. As for Episode Three, the Piggy Pen is an indefinite entity, much like the north bound metropolitan line, no one really knows where it ends and there is always the chance of an unscheduled termination. The Piggy Pen will continue to be the uncensored outlet for all things creative within JGP until such time as willing candidates cease to be.
Until next time…if there is a next time…
DTE
Jobsgopublic take on the Shoreditch Grand Prix
Catching up with Richard Tyrie one morning at the coffee machine he mentioned that there was this Shoreditch Grand Prix on tricycles – mad I thought, ‘sounds like fun’ I said.
The next day, Thursday 28th August, 3 days before the ‘grand prix’, I received an email from our swift acting marketeer asking for my date of birth for the entry form – things happen quickly at Jobsgopublic and you can obviously volunteer yourself with a quick pre-caffeine comment!
After rapidly securing some sponsorship from our esteemed colleagues and building our ‘Trike’ off we went for the weekend, agreeing to meet and formulate strategy on Sunday morning, an hour before the start. Talk about our careful military style tactical plan we were to implement!
Race day arrived and we strolled from the Jobsgopublic offices to Shoreditch, attracting some very strange looks from passers by. It’s not very often you see 3 grown men walking purposefully down the street with their race faces on, whilst carrying a bright red children’s tricycle across their shoulders.
The ‘Grand Prix’ itself was extremely well organised and I have to admit that it was with some trepidation we started to scope out the other competitors – perhaps our hour of ‘preparation’ wasn’t going to cut it on the day! As qualifying commenced and the crowds started to grow I felt sorry for Gerhard, our nominated race qualifier. The tension mounted but finally it was time for the off and boy did he rocket. So fast in fact that Jobsgopublic had qualified in pole position, unbelievable!
Ideas of grandeur steeped through us. We stayed off the alcohol and ate light at lunch expecting a podium finish, possibly even a first place. Serious tactical chat ensued and the plan was formulated. We were going to take this thing by storm. Race time!
Up first on the grid Richard Tyrie stretched off and prepared himself mentally for the first crucial lap. After a quick and confident interview it was time for the off and time for our well thought out plans to go horribly wrong.
As anyone who took part in this race would be able to tell you, a 2 minute lap around the streets of Shoreditch on a tricycle is a better workout than a 5 mile run. Some furious racing, swapping ‘drivers’ and total chaos ensued, followed by a pedal breaking away from our racing machine on the final lap. We finished in a respectable 7th position! Not bad all things considered.
Our racing team, Richard Tyrie, Gerhard Lazu and Richard Lawson have vowed to train heavily for next year. Special mention should go to Gerhard – he put us in pole position and was the only one of our team to do 2 laps consecutively during the race. Respect!
Shoreditch Grand Prix Facebook page
The Trike The Team Pre-race stretching (note the
ambulance)
Pole Position! Lawson aka. Roadrunner Lazu aka. The bullet
Tyrie aka. Face (it’s the legs) (Now you see him…)
(think the A Team)
The smiles of success!
RailsConf Europe 2008
We arrived in Berlin for this year’s Ruby On Rails conference greeted by a sign that seemed to say “Don’t throw glass bottles out of the train window”
It was a lucky escape, Levent was just about to break the rules!
As soon as we settled into our swish apartment in the Tiergarten region
I run away to a swanky bar for the aptly named “Bratwurst on Rails” event.
This involved lots of free Bratwurst, and lots of Ruby On Rails developers.
In the coming days there was quite an emphasis on good german beer,
Although Andy found it particularly hard to get hold of cider (“Apfelwein” is the correct word, apparently)
But the most fun was to be had before drinks…. At the conference…. Of course!
In DHH’s keynote, he told us that “Legacy is good!”
Having JGP4 hanging around forever is a good thing! It reminds us of how much better we’ve got!
Jeremy Kember talked about Performance on Rails, and I actually fell asleep.
Matt Wood talked about Ruby, Rails and The Human Genome Project, and how they churn out 75,000 gigabytes of data week, and manage it all with Rails.
Yehuda Katz talked about jQuery, and so many people were excited, they had to turn people away at the door.
I ended up in some boring talk about building bulky enterprise systems.
Star Wars is a metaphor for software development according to Justin Gehtland.
The Deathstar is just one big mess of an application, instead we should be a whole range of X-wings, B-wings, A-wings, …
Applications with wings!
Paul and Freddie from Texperts showed us how they do this with their clever javascript widget framework, which reminds me very much of Playlouder’s forthcoming Brix framework.
And of course there was RejectConf,
A mini-conference taking place in a pirate themed bar,
Designed for all the people who just weren’t good enough to speak at the main conference…
We heard about volunteering as a programmer in Cambodia,
We heard about integrating Capistrano into OSX with Macistrano,
And, of course,
I spoke there!
Gave an informative lecture on my MakeSpecsBetter plugin, designed to give the impression that your Rspec suite actually works.
And somehow that night Kalv managed to beat me and Tom at table football!!
Bummer!!!
Looking forward to next RailsConf in Portland, Oregon!
How to set up Jobs by Email on Jobsgopublic.com
When you need to find a job, you don’t want to have to scroll daily through your online search results around finding your perfect job. Selecting specific search criteria will enable jobs to be emailed directly to your inbox.
The Benefits:
* Search your results from your inbox at a time that is convenient to you.
* Your time is important, save time by setting it up so that it is automated.
* Monitor jobs as they become live on the website, without having to scroll the website.
You will need to register and login to your account in order to save your searches. Please see How to Register for more information.
From the search page:
1. Choose your search criteria (keyword, sector, salary and location), then click on the ’search’ button.
2. If the search results are specific enough using your criteria scroll to the bottom of the page and there is a section that says ‘Save Search’.
3. Give your saved search a description e.g. Planning positions – North East
4. You can change the criteria within your search at any time by using the edit feature. You will also automatically receive updated jobs by email from this saved search criteria.
5. Congratulations, you have set up your jobs by email. You can perform and set up as many as you like to assist you with your job search.
Still have questions? Please check out our Frequently Asked Questions section to see if you can find your answer.
If you are still experiencing difficulties accessing and using the website, we have a support team available 9am-5.30pm every work day on 0845 868 4391 or email support@jobsgopublic.com.
We’re always pleased to receive feedback about the site, if you are interested in providing us with feedback please email support@jobsgopublic.com or visit our blog, where you can comment also.
