PRIME business club

STOP PRESS: APPLICATIONS HAVE NOW CLOSED. PRIME is hiring. We are looking for an Enterprise Support Worker to work for us part-time in North East Derbyshire. Salary is £12,000 per year part-time - for half a 35 hour week.  You will be responsible for the delivery of PRIME’s programme in the North East Derbyshire area.

A self-starter with strong organisational, interpersonal and communication skills, you will organise and deliver enterprise awareness workshops and provide one-to-one support to clients under the DWP Flexible Routeways programme. This post is based in Chesterfield and is funded initially through to 22 June 2011. Experience of the business advice sector is important.

Application requests can be sent to prime@ace.org.uk or call 020 8765 7833. Or you can download the application form and background documents below. Please note that only applications on our application form will be accepted.

Application form

Job description

Briefing paper for post.

Closing date: Friday 22nd August 2008
Interviews: to be held in Chesterfield on Friday 29th August 2008.

STOP PRESS: APPLICATIONS HAVE NOW CLOSED PRIME is hiring. We are looking for someone for the key post of Director of Financial Development, based in our central office in South London. You will be responsible for managing the charity’s finances, improving how we fundraise and setting up a new loan fund for PRIME’s clients.

You will have an appropriate financial qualification, willingness to be hands-on, and the experience and drive to make things happen at an exciting time in PRIME’s development.

Application requests can be sent to prime@ace.org.uk or call 020 8765 7833. Or you can download the application form and background documents below.

Application form

Job description

Briefing paper for finance post.

Please note that only applications on our application form will be accepted.

Closing date: Monday 1st September 2008
Interviews: (to be held in London) on Tuesday 9th September 2008.

STOP PRESS: We have now made the switchover. We are running this web site at a new hosting firm (called Media Temple). We hope you notice a general improvement in speed, but more importantly, experience no sudden drops in speed or loss of service.

We made the change because our previous arrangements were not good at handling peaks in traffic when lots of visitors arrive simultaneously. This can happen when PRIME receives a mention in the media or is actively promoting several events. Since we have a lot of activity planned for the Autumn, we decided to make the changeover now so the web site will be able to cope with the anticipated rise in demand.

You may notice primebusinessclub.co.uk now shows in the browser address bar. Both www.primebusinessclub.com and www.primebusinessclub.co.uk point at exactly the same pages, so it doesn’t matter which name you type in. Previous bookmarks you may have saved to particular places on the site should all still work.

There are two things that we know are not working properly yet. The text-to-speech feature that lets you listen to an item works on some pages but not others, and the forums are not working at all. These are the two areas where we anticipated difficulties and they may take some time to fix.

Please let us know if there are any other things are broken and we’ll add them to the list. But overall we hope you find the change an improvement.

ORIGINAL ITEM:

PRIME Business Club’s main web site currently at www.primebusinessclub.com will arrive on this domain name over the weekend of the 21st to 22nd of June 2008. While the work is being done this site will be incomplete.

So if you are interested in becoming self-employed or starting your own business, please go over to www.primebusinessclub.com which we’ll leave fully up and running at its old home until this site is ready.

We are moving to a new hosting firm. It’s possible that some new comments made during the move on posts and in the forums may get lost.

Disruption is likely to be worst on the forums, which are proving a nightmare to move. Fortunately the bulk of the site is done with the excellent Wordpress, so most of it should be working again soon.

Likelihood of disruption:

• Main posts, pages and links - LOW
• Text-to-speech Listen this item - MEDIUM
• Forums - HIGH

Hopefully we’ll have the system back up on Monday - without the loss of anything important.

STOP PRESS: APPLICATIONS HAVE NOW CLOSED.

PRIME is hiring. We are looking for someone to get a new project going for us in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. You will be responsible for the delivery of PRIME’s programme in the Doncaster area. A self-starter with strong organisational, interpersonal and communication skills, you will organise and deliver pre-enterprise workshops, provide one-to-one support to clients and run a peer-to-peer business club. Experience of the business advice sector is important.

Application requests can be sent to prime@ace.org.uk or call 020 8765 7833. Or you can download the application form below.

Application form

Job description

Please note that only applications on our application form will be accepted. This post is funded initially through to 31st March 2010 and is based in Doncaster.

Closing date: Friday 16 May 2008
Interviews: (to be held in Doncaster): Tuesday 27 May 2008.

Some 800,000 people between 50 and state pension age are currently inactive but want to work, according to a new report commissioned by PRIME and written by leading economist Christopher Smallwood.

The majority of new businesses are created by people in their forties and fifties - indeed business owners aged over 50 account for 15 per cent of all business start-ups in England and Wales.

Companies started by older people have a 70 per cent chance of surviving the first five years, compared with only 28 per cent for younger people. Yet the report finds that finance for Jobcentre’s New Deal self-employment programme for the over 50s has been reduced.

“It is worth putting real money behind a drive to re-employ economically inactive over-50s”, says the report’s author Christopher Smallwood.

“In order to reintroduce them to the workforce, two things are needed: (1) widespread changes in employers’ practices relating to training, retention and recruitment, and (2) a more proactive approach from Government agencies to help people back to work, particularly in the area of self-employment.”

The report says that there are still a greater number of complaints about age discrimination in the workplace than about any other form of discrimination. However, the solution does not necessarily lie in more legislation.

What is required, argues Smallwood, is a change in attitudes and practices of employers both in the public and private sector, together with a greater focus on the possibilities for self-employment.

Self-employment also has an important role to play. A self-created job can put an individual back in control of their lives and build on the skills, experience and knowledge acquired over a life-time.

However, for people coming off benefits some significant poverty traps remain that make test trading difficult. “The confusion with HMRC needs to be resolved very quickly”, says Smallwood. At the moments it’s “confusing even to the advisers trying to explain the system”.

Smallwood report full text

Smallwood report executive summary

Christopher Smallwood is a leading UK economist, and has held a wide range of senior positions in government, industry, banking and media. He is a Member of the Competition Commission and until April 2005 he was Chief Economic Adviser to Barclays plc.

STOP PRESS: APPLICATIONS HAVE NOW CLOSED.

PRIME is hiring. We are looking for someone to provide maternity cover in Belfast.

The post is part time, and involves, running workshops and giving one-to-one support. Experience of community work and/or the business advice sector is required.

The closing date for applications is Tuesday the 22nd of January 2008, and interviews are scheduled for the 29th of January, in Belfast.

Full details and an application form are on our other web site, or phone 0208 765 7833.

STOP PRESS: APPLICATIONS HAVE NOW CLOSED.

PRIME is hiring. We are looking for someone to get a new project going for us in the Sheffield.

The post is part time, and involves, running workshops, giving advice and running a live business club. Experience of the business advice sector is important.

The closing date for applications is Thursday the 3th of January 2008, and interviews are scheduled for the 14th of January .

Full details on our other web site.

Now you can get almost any word on this site explained thanks to a service from Answers.com
Some phrases will also work.

To use it you just click rapidly twice on any word on the page (that isn’t a link). This causes a box to pop up containing a dictionary definition. (Links function in their normal way as links and won’t provide the Answers.com feature.)

Since dictionary definitions don’t always provide enough information there’s a button marked More at the bottom of the box. This will bring up a variety of other material, including Wikipedia entries and other more specialised sources.

The dictionary provided is American, but the More pages are more varied, differing from item to item.

So if you click on Capital Gains Tax the dictionary entry gives an American answer and is largely off the point. But the More page contains a Wikipedia survey of CGT around the world, and on some occasions a link to recent Times coverage.

The system does a better job on Home Information Packs, producing a full explanation of the UK scheme.

Note that this content is all external to the PRIME site, so the Readspeaker service won’t read it out.

You can customise the type and depth of material by clicking on the Personalize button at the top right of the box.

Do try it out and let us know what you think by posting a comment below.

Note: If you have your own web site this service is free - it’s funded by small text ads. It should be simple to install if you are using blogging software or have access to the HTML. More at Answers.com

STOP PRESS: APPLICATIONS HAVE NOW CLOSED.

PRIME is hiring. We are looking for someone to get a new project going for us in the North West, based in Warrington.

The closing date for applications is Wednesday the 5th of December 2007 at 4pm, and interviews are scheduled for Friday the 14th of December in Warrington.

Full details and application pack on our other web site.

PRIME’s central office in London will be out of operation between Friday the 5th and Monday the 8th of October 2007. This is to allow further repairs to be made to the electrical system badly damaged in the flooding back in July. Neither email or our normal telephone number will be operating.

However PRIME’s programme of free events around the UK is still carrying on. To book events coming up soon in Yorkshire and Cambridge please ring 07795 952045.

And you can contact PRIME partners for business advice in the normal way. Just use the Find Nearest search box to you right to find their phone number and web address so you can contact them directly.

This web site is now equipped with its own text-to-speech facility - so you can get the content read to you by an automated voice. This can be useful if you have problems seeing the text, but is also handy if you just want to listen to one of the longer items while getting on with something else.

You don’t have to download any software to get it to work. Simply click on the small yellow-and-green Listen icon near the headline of the item you are interested in. This will pop up a new window with the reader controls in it, should you you want to skip backwards or forwards. But the voice should start automatically with no further intervention after a few seconds.

If you prefer access keys to using a mouse, then access key L is the equivalent of clicking on the Listen icon. If there are multiple stories on the page the reader will start from the beginning of the item nearest your cursor position.

To stop reading simply close the reader’s pop-up window. Or click on another Listen icon to start it reading something different.

The technology PRIME is using comes from Readspeaker, a company founded in Sweden eight years ago. It now has many public sector and corporate clients in the UK. The Readspeaker approach is to keep the complicated technology on its own servers, so web site visitors don’t have to download anything.

This approach makes things very easy for the web site visitor. The downside to this is that all the decisions about how the reader works have been taken by the particular web site’s authors - in our case PRIME.

So for example we haven’t set it up to read all the navigation links, because for most people just wanting to hear a particular article that would be pretty tedious.

But if you find text-to-speech particularly valuable , perhaps because you are having sight problems, then there is another approach which can give you much greater control yourself. That is to install suitable software on your own machine. Some of this is free. You can read more about the options on the Accessibility page.

Damage to the wiring at our central office was worse than expected, so the power has been shut down till Monday while it is ripped out and replaced. This means we have temporarily lost email and phones until the start of next week (6th of August).

However PRIME’s programme of free events in other parts of the UK is still carrying on. And you can contact PRIME partners for business advice in the normal way. Just use the Find Nearest search box to you right to find their phone number and web address so you can contact them directly.

The flooding affecting the UK hit PRIME on Friday the 20th of July, taking out the IT systems, phone lines and post room - all rather unwisely located in the basement of the central office we share with Age Concern in South London. We hope to have all services restored by Friday the 27th, but will keep you informed.

Meanwhile you can type in your post code in the Find Nearest box at top right and get details of a PRIME partner you can contact immediately for business advice. Our events in other parts of the UK are also still carrying on.

You can request a pack from the form on this web site (click the flower growing under a rain cloud), but we may not be able to send them out until our offices open up again.

STOP PRESS (Monday 30th of July 2007)

Everything is now working again.

However, all emails sent to us on between Saturday the 21st of July and Tuesday the 24th have probably been lost. Emails sent from Wednesday the 25th were successfully queued, and we are now working through them.

Here’s a marvelous quote from Hokusai, Japan’s best-known artist, whose woodcut of women diving for abalone we have used in the post above.

“From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with.

“At 75 I’ll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress.

“At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100 I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110 everything I create - a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before.”

Hokusai

About a quarter of the people who have contacted PRIME over the last two years kindly filled in a form giving some details about themselves. The responses have now been analysed and here’s what you told us.

The results were independently analysed for PRIME by Professor Mark Hart from Kingston University Business School.

The purpose of this kind of formal monitoring exercise is twofold. Firstly it re-assures our supporters that PRIME, a charity, is reaching the people it should be reaching. And secondly it enables us to spot gaps where we should be doing more.

Of course this isn’t the only way we get feedback. Indeed, you are very welcome to email us at any time or post comments in the forums.