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.

Tags: career advice for retail job seeking, Graduate retail careers, student and graduate jobs in retail

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!

Tags: Banking and Finance, graduate job opportunities at Capita, student loans and grants, Student money

Out pals at InBev have completed a £35bn (gulp) takeover of USA brewer Anheuser-Busch to create the world’s largest brewer. And the new catchy name? Anheuser-Busch InBev, which sounds like an Austrian football team, or toilet disease. They’ll sell 46 billion litres of beer a year, putting the following brands under one roof: Stella, Budweiser, Beck’s, Hoegaarden, Leffe, Brahma, Staropramen, Michelob, Rolling Rock. It has upset patriotic American politicians that their appalling beers should be owned by a Belgium firm, but they’ll get over it. Few job losses are expected, growth is on the cards, particularly for brand Budweiser, whose performance in Europe compared to the rest of the Western world has been relatively weak. Like the piss-awful beer itself.

Tags: Food and Drink, graduate careers at Inbev, leisure and hospitality, the graduate programme at Inbev

Bowing to public and political pressure, banks UBS and Goldman Sachs will not pay bonuses to their top executives for 2008, though other employees could still be in line to receive a bonus. At UBS their entire bonus structure has been reviewed so it is now only linked to the firm’s profitability. Other banks are expected to follow suit. A tricky one this: companies like Goldman are renowned for taking over every waking hour of their staff (and some of the sleeping ones too). That hard work seemed justified if it meant you got a bonus so big it meant you could eat swan for breakfast. Who’s going to want to sell their sole now..? Surely some will just be grateful to have a job. US bank Citigroup will have made 75,000 redundant by the time the current job cull is over. Can the last one out turn off the light. Er…and pay the electricity bill.

Tags: Banking and Finance, Graduaet careers at Goldman Sachs, UBS job opportunities

Restructuring at Sun Microsystems will save them £540m a year, but 6,000 jobs will be axed to help them get there – that’s 18% of the workforce. That’s a lot. Many technology firms are feeling the pinch from a drop in consumer demand. Meanwhile, the 1,000 UK staff at the failed bank Lehman Brothers will get annual bonuses despite running the bank into administration. And despite some creditors of the bank never getting to see the money they’re owed.  PricewaterhouseCoopers is overseeing the process and will be for a number of years as it looks through more than $1 trillion worth of outstanding trades. And over at Easyjet there was a board room fight: the budget airline hit its profit targets this year – good news – but wanted to cut back on expectations for profit next year. The fall out between Stelios and his directors wasn’t because he felt they were being too cautious in their outlook, he felt they weren’t being cautious enough. Now that’s a worry!

Tags: banking and finance careers for graduates, graduate careers in aviation, PWC growth, Using IT