Careerplan4.me Experts Say Sky News' Report on Unemployment Figures Highlights New Shift

(PRWEB) May 14, 2010 -- Over 8 million people in the UK are no longer working, according to Sky News’ report on the latest Office for National Statistics figures.

In the last quarter alone, 88,000 people have either stopped looking for work, are students or are carers. Yet, people claiming unemployment benefit fell by over 27,000 (to 1.52 million).

Experts at www.careerplan4.me believe that the figures highlight the trend for people to work in a number of part-time or freelance roles.

Tor Macleod, co-founder of www.careerplan4.me believes people are adapting to their new situation by reducing spending and finding new sources of income, which doesn’t include claiming benefit. “The quiet cultural shift we are seeing is phenomenal. Many people initially think that when they are made redundant, they’ll be able to walk into a similar role, but from our perspective, that is changing dramatically.

“The ONS figures show that 6000 less jobs were available last quarter, and we see that truth daily; the same roles aren’t as readily available, and if they are, they are often at reduced salaries.”

Leon Benjamin, author of Winning by Sharing, says, “We’re experiencing continuous changes in the way we work and do business, but people haven’t necessarily seen the full the cultural shift yet. The emergence of the network economy and its implications for corporations, employees and portfolio workers is immense. People are working and conducting business in completely different ways, which are at odds with the traditional nature of the firm and its command and control of organisational structures”.

Careerplan4.me believes the modern day economy highlights jobseekers’ need to embrace new technology and processes to help them on the road to ‘fractional work’.
Macleod continues, “Work now is often not a single unit, it can be made up of fragmented, part-time or freelance jobs where increasingly people share their time between different employers – and make it work for their specific needs. If people understand the shift and get the career planning tools they need, they can work it to their advantage”.

Careerplan4.me provides a range of online career planning tools to help professionals who’ve been made redundant to find a new career. www.Careerplan4.me gives a competitive advantage over other jobseekers, helps break down the often daunting task of finding a new job and focus on the positive aspects of redundancy. It firstly offers career planning resources to assess skills, identify key strengths and areas for development and helps set objectives and goals. It then provides door-opening tools such as jobhunt4.me which scours 350,000 companies’ job sites; Mandis, the UK’s leading business intelligence provider; CareerSiteAdvisor to help understand the modern day job market; as well as advice to use technology and the Internet successfully, in the same way as employers and recruiters.

For more information, visit www.careerplan4.me.