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!