What's new at Working Week

First class technology skills from cradle to grave are essential if the UK is to continue climbing out of recession.

More than 1.5 million people already work in IT and telecoms, and each year the sector takes on 110,000 new professional recruits. These jobs are key to creating wealth and driving the economy forward in challenging business conditions.

Working Week has been working closely with organisations involved in ensuring these skills are nurtured from a young age. Projects have included writing education materials aimed at teenagers and producing marketing intelligence to encourage employers and individuals to take a more active interest in advancing their IT skills.

Contact Lucie Carrington to find out how Working Week can help you tailor your message to diverse audiences.

Public sector cuts will inevitably mean slashing backroom operations as organisations strive to protect frontline services.

It's vital that we get rid of as much waste and inefficiency as possible from our public services but we have to be careful not to go too far. Often it is the administrators and managers who are enabling our policeman, doctors, nurses, teachers and the like to do their job to the best of their ability.

Projects that Working Week has recently completed in the health and education sectors have brought this home. For example we have been working with schools and colleges to raise the profile of school business managers. Nine in ten secondary schools and one in three primary schools have business managers. These men and women are generating, on average, an extra £30,000 a year per school and freeing up head teacher time for what really matters - improving teaching and learning.

Contact Lucie Carrington to find out how Working Week can help you communicate complex messages to policy makers, decision takers and practitioners.

The launch of a number of new organisations this year to oversee how qualifications are developed, delivered and funded is promoting a number of communication initiatives.

A network of sector-level bodies to deliver skills training, organisations to decide how and where money is spent, and a reform of how qualifications are recognised and accredited are all being ushered in over a few months. The qualifications arena is complex and can be difficult to understand. Making sure employers are well informed about new developments is critical to winning their support and encouraging them to invest time and money in training staff in the future.

Working Week is helping several organisations involved with skills and training to explain the new initiatives to their key audiences of employers and potential trainees.

Contact Adele Kimber to find out more about how Working Week can help create relevant content to explain skills and training issues.

Bringing data alive and making the figures sing is a key problem for many managers. But audiences only engage with data when they understand what it means for them or their business.

Working Week has just finished helping an organisation that specialises in labour market research to do just that. With several years of data under its belt, it wanted to raise awareness of its research and up its impact on policy makers, practitioners and opinion formers.

The answer was to use the research findings to develop a set of case studies and story lines that would appeal to the organisation's key audiences. It's about creating that emotional pull that tells your audience why the figures matter.

It's not as simple as it sounds and requires not just knowledge of what the data shows but a genuine understanding of what it means in practice. Whether they are looking to reach an internal or external audience, until they take this leap, organisations will never get the return they want on their research investment.

Contact Lucie Carrington if you'd like to find out more about how we can help translate your data into compelling content.

Diversity remains high on the business agenda. Working Week was recently asked to look at factors that prevent professional women and people from minority ethnic backgrounds climbing the career ladder.

It's clear from our work that different minority groups require different approaches if employers are to harness and maximise their talents. For example, women make up half of the workforce but only one in six move into senior management roles. But Black Minority Ethnic people are barely represented in many professions.

Targeted intervention is the way forward. But organisations must also target how they talk and write about diversity if they are to get the message across to the people who count.

Does your organisation need to up its equal opportunities game? Contact Lucie Carrington for more information on how we can help you target your diversity message at the right audiences.

Working Week is working closely with clients in the public, private and voluntary sector to ensure they make their audiences count.

A major piece of work we have done with a public sector leadership body has involved analysing who its primary audiences are and how best to cater for their information needs. We’ve also been helping assess what key messages the organisation needs to get across to different stakeholders.

‘We are not advocating watering down or hyping up a message to make it more palatable for one audience compared with another,’ says Working Week’s Adele Kimber. ‘But it is critical that organisations understand what facts, information and ideas will have the most impact on developing opinions or galvanising people into action.’