Stick with me kid: we found the retailers with a right to be optimistic when we went to the Careers Forum and our pals at Mothercare have stuck to their word and doubled their profits on this time last year to £9.5m. Sales outside of the UK were up 9% so the brands expansion and internet sales plans seem to be on course. As boss Ben Gordon reminds us “Only 0.5% of the world’s babies are born in the UK” that leaves them 99.5% to clothe and entertain! The Middle East, Eastern Europe and Russia were among the company’s best-performing markets. Mothercare currently has 24 stores in and around Moscow and plans to open another 40 stores in the next three years. People (with low self-esteem) will always have babies, recession on not, so get your passport and CV ready comrade!

Retail’s up and down isn’t it?! One day you’ve got asos spanking the backside of everyone’s expectations; the next day someone’s trying to sell Woolworths for a pound. And today M&S are knocking 20% off everything in the store to get people back in before Christmas, and Debenhams holding a similar 3 day sale. However, across the board the retail sector is doing better than people predicted. The Office for National Statistics said that sales dropped by just 0.1% in October – way ahead of forecasts. Don’t forget the bullish retailers we met at the Careers Forum – there’s some good profile videos here of those defying the crunch, including good old asos.

Headlines abound that Rolls Royce is to cut 1,500 – 2,000 jobs around the world. Don’t shoot yourself just yet – there will be 140 jobs likely to be cut at Derby and the firm has been cutting jobs since January. The cuts do not affect Rolls’ graduate scheme – an increasingly desireable venture as detailed in this vid. Worth remembering that the job cuts ammount to just 4% of the overall workforce. Rocknroller.

There’s a recession on and those companies and employers that don’t pull their socks up are going to lose their pants. Just so in the case of Liberata – the company behind student maintenance allowances, who have botched the delivery of those grants; thousands of students are still waiting for their payments, more than two months after the beginning of term, as a result of Liberata encountering technical difficulties in processing EMA applications (paid to about 600,000 teenagers from low-income families as an incentive to keep them from dropping out of education).  At one stage the backlog of applications was in excess of 200,000. Despite reducing this backlog to 12,000 the government (Learning and Skills Council) have found it “unacceptable” that young people had had their EMA payments delayed and awarded the contract to Capita. That cock-up has lost Liberata over £60m in revenues, but the BBC has claimed that Liberata knew a year ago that it would be unable to fulfil the contract. Don’t worry; as is often the way with companies who fail on government contracts, they bounce back to make a hash of something equally important months later!

Heaven knows I’ve got my work cut out finding the good news out there right now. That said, my old pal and head of the AGR Carl Gilliard keeps going on record to say that the majority of graduate recruiters are not cutting their graduate intake, and a significant percentage are actually increasing the number of grads they take on. That might include the world’s largest PC maker, HP whose profits have come in higher than expected, giving its shares a 10% bounce and sales up nearly 20%. Last year the company overtook Dell as the biggest PC maker, and that position looks like holding thanks to global reach, a broad customer base and…er…ongoing cost cuts.