A call-centre business that plans to create 10,000 jobs has been launched in Croydon, Surrey. Backed by £1m of investment, Call Britannia, aims to open 10 new call centres across the UK over the next seven years, giving 10,000 staff a minimum of six months’ employment, and equipping them with skills, training, support and work experience. The company will then help its ‘graduates’ to find work. Think about it: 6 months paid work and then help getting a job at the end of it. Good bye pride, hello to getting the fear on Sunday nights.

Good news for engineering grads two days on the trot! Rolls-Royce has announced plans to invest £300 million in four new UK manufacturing sites (aerospace and nuclear power), creating or securing 800 jobs. The Government are spanking out £45m toward the investment and we can expect to see more of that going to other employers. Rolls also announced two research programmes which will focus on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions of future aircraft programmes and accelerate new manufacturing methods. Rocknrolla as they say. Watch their placement video.

Tags: engineering opportunities for graduates, Rolls royce placements for students

Looking for a career in leisure and tourism? Fair play; it seems to be doing surprisingly well given that we are supposed to be sleeping on brown sheets, financially speaking. As a testament to that, hotel group Jury’s Inn has secured £60m in funding to support a further expansion of the business. The firm already has 23 hotels in the UK (the one is Bristol is actually quite nice) and has already opened five new hotels across the UK this year Sheffield, Watford, Exeter, Swindon and Derby. The new sites are expected in Portsmouth, Glasgow, Newcastle and Bradford, so if you’re in those areas, get your CVs and application letters ready.

Tags: graduate opportunities in hotel chain, Leisure and Tourism, working in hotels

The impossibly named Ener-g is a Salford-based renewable energy technology group whose new careers programme is aimed at turning the best engineering graduates into the senior executives of the future. The company, which employs 700 people worldwide, and has a reported turnover of more than £90 million, will give graduates an opportunity to work in the low carbon sector. Boss Derek Duffill says: “High calibre engineers are at a premium and we believe the environmental technology sector will continue to generate explosive growth for many years to come. It offers the long-term career goals and financial rewards that ambitious engineers are looking for. Crucially, it also gives them an opportunity to design, develop, manufacture and operate the technologies that can make such a positive difference to society on a global level.” Each graduate will be mentored by a senior manager and there will be an off-the-job development programme over the first two years to look after them. Nice one Derek.

Tags: Graduate engineering programmes, working in Manchester

If you work for Kellogg’s I’d guess that the last thing you’d want more of is Tony the Tiger, Snap, Crackle, Pop or the unimaginatively named Cocoa the Cocoa Pop Monkey, but apparently I’m wrong.  Kellogg’s have decided to reinvent their staff reward system, abandoning jargon and buzzwords and instead use their ‘popular’ mascots to make their staff reward statements easier to understand and beautiful.  Within the staff reward scheme is the company’s pension system, so if you managed to land yourself a job at Kellogg’s you to could open up a pension statement delivered by Tony the Tiger with Snap Crackle and Pop sat in the background.  There is a serious reason behind their choice (although it’s completely lost on me!), which my good friend David Lowe will attempt to explain: “Now, more than ever, we want our people to know they matter to us so we made a conscious decision to ‘sell’ our reward offering a lot more proactively than we have done in the past.  Our trademark characters are fun, and features such as our ‘Corn-flex’ section are backed up with a serious agenda. The statements are a new way of talking about reward for us - they do more than communicate the facts and figures relating to an employee’s pay and benefits; they embed our company culture, inspire employees and demonstrate we value them enough to put serious consideration into communicating their reward.”

Tags: Communications, kellogg's, Pensions