FE News Blog

Captain Exclusive Strikes Again

Captain Exclusive strikes again.... Wearing his pants over his trousers and a tea towel as a cape it is Captain Exclusive fighting the FE cause.

Captain Exclusive's aim is to catapult FE into the limelight, raising Joe Public's perception of FE, what are skills?, what is a level 2?, why should my kids be interested in Vocational Training?, why are Colleges taking on Universities? and why should the public be concerned with lecturer and Assessor pay in our £11 Billion per year melting pot industry that specialises in producing opportunity.

Captain Exclusive is the editor of FE News and this week has provide our readers with 13 Exclusives... 13 Exclusives in a week.

At the start of the week we had Graham Hoyle from the ALP kick off our series on how would you spend the LSC's £11 billion. Then Stephen Williams MP on his £11 billion wish list... and then Steve Murphy who was a recent STAR awards winner - kicked off our Winners Week. This was just Monday - our readers got a taste of the superb week that was to follow.

Tuesday saw Lawrence Miles throw in his two penny's worth on what he'd do with £11 Billion and Robert Randall continues our Winners Week with FE as the poor Cousin in Education.

On Wednesday we had Claire Donovan  with EEF on what she would spend £11 Billion and another winner Patrica Barr talking about Pushing Learners to achieve.

Thursday we had the brilliant Alison West give us an Exclusive on how she would spend £11 Billion and discuss the peculiar definition of Skills.  Maria Rounding another winner lets of the War Cry that Education should be for everybody.

Captain Exclusive gave us all the Friday Feeling with Paul Mackney from the UCU. Did you see his ideas for the £11 billion budget? David Batup, concludes a three part series on the Employer Engagement Coach. Libby James concludes the Winners week, with everyone deserves an award. Jane Machell gives us an Exclusive on plans to monitor students creating a climate of Fear over the scary plans for staff to monitor students in a 1984 style proposal.

Wow, what a week. Captain Exclusive thank you.... and er, can you wear your pants inside your trousers next week??

For the latest and the greatest - always check out www.FEnews.co.uk

Writen by the people for the people of FE. If you are interested in contributing to FE News, with any ideas, articles or an interview: click here to contact  Captain Exclusive today

We'd also like to say a really big thank you to each of our writers and interviewers for taking their time out to provide us the readers with an insight into their views and opinions on our great industry. If you'd like to contribute please do not hesitate to contact our news editor Vijay today.

www.FEnews.co.uk

Do you have an opinion on FE? Why not write for FE News??

FE News is your news site, so contribute and let everyone know the real story. If you have an opinion on FE and Work Based Learning, why not contact our editor Vijay Pattni who is interested in talking to you about the possibility for writing in FE News.

We are interested in hearing from Principals, strategists, Managers, Lecturers, Tutors,  Assessors and Verifiers - if you are a learner you too are a part of the FE industry. FE News offers a 360 degree perspective of the FE industry - if you work in FE, have an opinion or a story to tell then let us know. We are interested in individual articles, opinion pieces or regular slots on FE News.

If you want to make a difference in the industry and see your name in print then email Vijay@fenews.co.uk

www.FEnews.co.uk

YMCA Training are the latest NVQ training provider to advertise on FE careers.co.uk

YMCA Training are the latest NVQ Training Provider to advertise their job vacancies on www.FEcareers.co.uk. the specialist Further Education and Work Based Learning NVQ job site

FE Careers has been established since 2004, and regularly recieves nearly 40,000 job seekers each month. What makes FE Careers so interesting, is that the majority of their visitors are Further Education and NVQ work based learning specialists. FE careers advertise hundreds of FE jobs each week for a range of roles including NVQ Assessor jobs, Tutors, Trainers, Internal Verifiers, Managers and Directors for FE Colleges, NVQ Training Providers, Awarding bodies and Government quangos such as the LSC.

Advertisers on FE Careers range from the LSC, CACHE, YMCA Training, Protocol Skills, Carter and Carter, TBG and John Laing Training. Check out the latest jobs on FE Careers by clicking here.

If you are interested in advertising your FE and Work Based Learning jobs on FE Careers, click here for more information.

www.FEcareers.co.uk

www.FEnews.co.uk

FE News RSS service - personalise your home page

We have had a couple of people asking about RSS and basically what is it?... We could get all technical, but basically you can personalise the search engine of your choice with the latest news stories from FE News. FE News RSS enables you to read news that is interesting to you - it is  a way of personalising news that is tailored to you. So it will reduce your need to hunt for interesting articles, instead they are sent to you and you can choose which is going to be of interest to you.

All you need to do is spend 20 seconds setting up a my Google, my Yahoo or my AOL account add the 'FE News RSS feed' which is: http://www.fenews.co.uk/rss/newsfeed.xml.asp

You can either copy the FE News RSS feed and paste it into add content or you can click here and then onto the icon of the search engine of your choice.

Once you add content the search engine instantly updates with the latest news, so you can pick and choose which news is interesting to you and only view news stories when they are interesting or relevant to you.

www.FEnews.co.uk

The Further Education News website. 

Glotel sign another extention for Further Education Recruitment Advertising on FE Careers.co.uk

FE Careers.co.uk have announced today yet another long term advertising agreement with a Further Education and NVQ recruitment agency. Glotel have been advertising with FE Careers since March 2005 and they have decided to extend their current advertising contract way into 2007.

Glotel are currently advertising a range of NVQ Assessor, Tutor and managerial roles on FE Careers. Click here to see the latest Glotel roles.

FE Careers are really happy to announce another long term advertising arrangement with Glotel. This month has seen FE Careers announce several of the large NVQ and FE recruitment agencies sign up for long term recruitment advertising arrangements. These have included Protocol National and WorkAble. Other long term recruitment agency advertisers include Chimeara, Skills Source, Prolific Recruitment and ZedX.

FE Careers are continuing to make huge leaps and bounds within FE recruitment advertising. Tomorrow will see the announcement of yet another marketing partnership with a Work Based Learning association. This will be in addition to the marketing relationships with the Association of Learning Providers (ALP), the Institute of Assessors and Verifiers (IAV) and the Association of External Verifiers (AEV).

Watch this space for more internal news at FE Careers and FE News

www.FEcareers.co.uk

www.FEnews.co.uk

Further Education Recruitment Advertising Testimonials for FE Careers.co.uk

FE Careers our sister Further Education and Work Based Learning recruitment advertising website, has been continuing their successes of late. They were selected earlier in the summer by the LSC for recruitment advertising. FE Careers always ask for feedback on job advertisers response to their advertising campaign. Now most of our advertisers tell us verbally so we then struggle to be able to document their testimonial... then like buses FE Careers received two testimonials within a 30 minute period!

So we thought we would share them with you:

Our first testimonial from yesterday, came from Michelle at Unique Training. Unique are just setting up a new training division and were looking for highly qualified and experienced Vocational training and NVQ specialists. In a one month period, they placed just three adverts, 2 NVQ assessors and 1 Internal Verifier. Within a month they received 33 qualified and experienced NVQ specialists responding to their adverts. Unique were very impressed by the quality of candidates, their experience and the number of relevant candidates responding to their adverts.

Michelle from Unique Training says: “I’m really pleased with the response that we have had from our advertising with you so far.  We are still in the process of going through the applications but I am hoping that we will manage to recruit a couple of people from the candidates that have applied.”  Michelle has explained that they will complete an ongoing advertising campaign in September.

Another of our pleased advertisers was Zedx, a specialist Further Education recruitment agency. Zedx offer recruitment agency solutions as well as online advertising for customers on their website. Zedx has used many different online media for advertising positions, but have been highly impressed with the quality of candidates and volume of directly relevant Further Education and Work Based Learning candidates. Zedx placed some 37 job adverts within a month and received over 80 qualified and experienced FE professionals. They have already had several of these candidate attending interviews with clients and already had 1 job offer. These are excellent results, especially as the lead time from receiving a CV to a provider offering a candidate can take several weeks.

Louise from Zedx commented: “I just wanted to advise you how pleased we are with the quality of candidates applying to our vacancies. We have already submitted CVs to our clients and one of them has already had an interview. FE Careers may become our main source of attracting candidates.” Zedx have now gone on to advertise again with FE Careers and are looking to advertise on an ongoing basis. Other FE and WBL recruitment agencies who advertise with FE Careers on an ongoing basis include Chimeara, Skills Source, Prolific Recruitment, Glotel and Workable.

Watch this space for more internal news from www.FEcareers.co.uk and www.FEnews.co.uk

Press Release : Record Numbers of NVQ Assessor job seekers visit FE Careers

It has been yet another record month for specialist Work Based Learning and Further Education job site, www.FEcareers.co.uk. Record numbers of NVQ Assessors, Internal Verifiers, Tutors, Lecturers and Managers have continued to visit FE Careers for their next career move. FE Careers advertise job vacancies across the entire Further Education sector, with vacancies from FE Colleges, Work Based Learning Training Providers, Charities and specialist Recruitment Agencies.

FE Careers and her sister news website FE News have continued to attract new visitors and retain a loyal band of Further Education specialists. FE Careers and FE News are strategic marketing partners with the Association of Learning Providers (ALP), the Institute of

Assessors and Verifiers (IAV) and the Association of External Verifiers (AEV). Through these partnerships FE Careers and FE News are able to offer tailored recruitment advertising and news services to a cross section of the Further Education industry.

FE News has just been signed up to provided news feeds to Learningandskillsweb.org.uk  a DfES and Learning and Skills Council funded website which provides information to the FE industry.

February saw nearly 1 million hits, 320,000 page views, over 53,000 visitor sessions and 16,500 unique visitors. This is a 14% increase on the previous record month in January.

The CEO of FE Careers and FE News is especially pleased with the results. We snatched a few moments with Gavin who explained “We are delighted with our results in February. We had a further healthy increase in job seekers and news readers, but we also had an increase in organisations advertising their job vacancies, and organisations advertising their services. The advertising space on FE News is nearly all booked out until May 2006. We are starting campaigns for a variety of different services to the FE market. We have also had campaigns ranging from the CEL (Centre in Excellence in Leadership), to Ento Direct, Ariam Media, Momentum PR. We are even attracting advertisers from    oxbridge with Lucy

Cavendish College.

We are also really pleased that we have increased the number of FE Colleges advertising on FE Careers. We have had around 25% of our advertisers from FE Colleges; this month has seen this increase to 30% of our job advertisers from FE Colleges. FE Careers main strength is in Work Based Learning job advertising, this is fuelled by our partnership with the ALP, the IAV and the AEV, but our unique position is that we advertise vacancies across the entire FE sector.”

FE Careers have recently launched several satellite job sites to target niche areas within Work Based Learning and Further Education. It sounds like College jobs.co.uk has made an immediate impact for FE Careers, and the record number of NVQ Assessor job seekers could be down to the satellite site assessor jobs.co.uk. At the beginning of the year FE Careers launched Assessor jobs.co.uk to attract NVQ job seekers, Tutor jobs.co.uk for FE, Employability, Key and Basic Skills Tutors, Vocational jobs.co.uk, Training Provider jobs.co.uk and College jobs.co.uk.

FE News & FE Careers to launch new RSS service.

FE Careers & FE News are in the final testing stages of launching RSS feeds for their visitors.

FE News visitors will be able to receive up to the minute articles straight into their inbox. Website owners and webmasters can also feature up to the minute FE News articles as they appear on the FE News site.

FE Careers clients will be able to power their vacancy page with the new FE Careers RSS service. This new service will enable FE Careers advertisers to manage all of their vacancies from one central point (the client profile page) and this will enable advertisers to easily edit vacancies, ensuring that only 'live' vacancies are featured on FE Careers and their own organisations vacancy webpage.

.... Furthermore these new services are completely free!

The Managing Director of both FE Careers and FE News talks about the RSS service "We are launching this service to provide a proactive service for our visitors. Although we want you to continue to visit us, we want to be able to provide a proactive and instant service. News subscribers can receive news straight into their inbox and read the articles as they go live on FE News, instead of a weekly visit. FE Careers clients will be able to power their vacancies through one central point, broadcasting their vacancies on both FE Careers and their own website.

We are ploughing funds back into the sites so as we can continue to transform the services offered to the sector. Job seekers will be able to find vacancies quicker and easier, FE News will proactively bring the latest news to you. This is just another extention of our service, we are listening to our audience and personalising our services. I hope you enjoy using the FE RSS service."

Keep your eyes peeled for the official launch within the next couple of weeks!

Rumour : A4E Wales on the acquisition trail?

We have heard unconfirmed reports that A4E Wales are interested in acquiring another training provider in Wales! Is this rumour or have we caught a sniff of an exciting story?

We have heard from a couple of sources that they have also heard a rumour that A4E are in talks with Barry Training. Our sources were then quick to add that they had only heard a rumour, so have we heard Chinese whispers about two companies forming a partnership for a project or will there be a substantial training provider acquisition in the near future?

If you know any more info, please do not hesitate to contact us to reveal all.

VT Plus looking to acquire another training provider? Total rumour?

We have heard several totally unconfirmed rumours that VT Plus are in the market to acquire another training provider. But our sources do not want to go on the record, so is this truth or total fabrication??????

VT acquired Hospitality Plus several years ago, so could these rumours be correct that they are in the market to acquire another training provider? VT Plus specialises in Hospitality, Sport and Rec, Care and Early Years Care and Engineering. So if they were to go on the acquisition trail would they move into new markets or look to dominate in their current specialism?

Their spread of vocational expertise is already very impressive, especially when we look to 2012 with the skills required for the Olympics (Sport, Hospitality & Catering etc). Their parent VT Education and Skills already has another organisation looking after the Navy's Training, Careers Management delivers training and support as the company title explains in Careers Management. So if the rumours are true where would they look to strengthen their portfolio?

Does anyone know anything about this, or have our sources been sitting in dark rooms inventing totally fabricated untruths? Who would you suggest that they buy if they were in the market? Please contact us if you know anything, especially if you are willing to go on the record!