Professional Services (Accounting, Legal, HR/Recruitment, Consulting)
Overview
The professional services industry comprises organisations that employ tertiary qualified and professionally trained individuals and supply specialist technical and advisory services to individual clients and corporations.
Geographical Centres
London is the second largest economy in Europe after Germany and one of the main centres in the Northern Hemisphere for professional services. All of the major international firms that operate in this particular sector will have an office located in London and many of them will also be found, to a smaller extent, in other major cities throughout the UK.
These organisations will almost certainly have an internal recruitment and sourcing division, focused purely on building a pipeline of potentially suitable candidates to manage forecasted recruitment needs. You can usually send your CV to these teams directly via the corporate website. This can be a good way to initiate contact with an organisation of interest, if you have relevant qualifications and work experience. If you don’t, don’t bother sending your CV! It is competitive even for people with the right profile, without experience or qualifications you will simply be wasting yours and their time.
Employment Trends
Traditionally, Aussies and Kiwis have had no trouble getting work in this sector. There have always been opportunities for people with the right skills and attitude and usually plenty of contract work. Contracts can range anywhere from two days to two years or more, and can provide as much career development and opportunity as any permanent position. The Brits love Antipodean contractors as they have a reputation for being hard working and reliable and as such, will accommodate their employment by offering a contract, in line with visa requirements.
There is no shortage of recruiters in this space either and it does pay to make contact with a couple. Beware of registering with too many however, as they do all tend to work with the same companies and you can suffer from oversaturation in the marketplace.
Perhaps one of the biggest factors affecting employment forecasts and confidence in this sector recently is the ‘global economic downturn’. While it is true that many firms have made redundancies and have slowed recruitment of permanent headcount, many firms are also aware of the major rebuilding required after the last downturn and are not being as bullish with regard to laying off staff. As you can see from this recent analysis, jobs have slowed but in some cases only marginally and the legal sector there has actually seen an increase in advertised jobs in the UK.
More Accounting information Here
Accountancy, Legal, “Human Resources”, Recruitment Job Trends Accountancy jobs decreased by 19%, Legal jobs increased by 135%, “Human Resources” jobs decreased by 12% and Recruitment jobs decreased by 58%. Below we’ve added a search tile from Allthetopbananas.com. In our opinion they provide a unique job seeking experience as the site uses innovative technology. By forwarding applicants to the employers own website, Allthetopbananas.com aims to reduce the amount of clicks involved in finding the perfect job. Basically they are like a Google for jobs where practically every advertised job is listed for you, from corporate websites to job boards. No need to spend hours looking through loads of sites. Nice!!
