Sales lead to jobs - Barclay's Corporate & FT survey- Can Sales save the UK?

From Banker Bashing to Civil Servant Clobbering.

My i newspaper has been doing its fair share of banker bashing the last few weeks, so for a little contrast I purchased the Financial Times today.

The FT today is sold at the eye watering price of £2.00 (some 20 times my ‘ i newspaper’ or to put it another way - two weeks’ worth!) Time for me to get it on my Kindle I suppose.

The FT have a series running called the 'job creators' this week.
The’ pink’ paper’s view of the coalition government’s strategy of hope is a touch sceptical.



The Government expects the UK private sector will create jobs to offset public sector redundancies as the spending cuts take place.

In spite of concerns over rising unemployment perhaps the Government is pinning its hopes on the independent Office for Budget Responsibility which forecasts that the private sector will generate £1.5 m jobs over the next 5 years more than offsetting the 400,000 to go in the public sector.

(Front page right hand side column "Companies resist idea of taking on jobless civil servants" 21st Feb 2011 FT) However the FT rightly asks

“Where are the jobs to come from?”

One statistic to come out of a report study they have conducted in conjunction with Barclay's Corporate of 500 UK companies was that 78% want to see solid evidence of sales growth before creating jobs. The figure before the recession was 69%.
What has caught the eye of many though is that the majority of the survey resists the idea of employing civil servants.

When asked whether they are interested in employing ex-public sector employee:
32% not at all interested
25% not very interested
30% said quite interested
8% said very interested
6% said don’t know

The FT concluded that 57% of companies are not interested in employing ex-public sector workers.

Alongside a chart of the above statistics, the FT placed another set.
52% of companies think ex-public sector workers are not equipped to take jobs in their business:-
It was broken down as follows:-
20% said not at all well equipped
32% said not very well equipped
37% said quite well equipped
6% said very well equipped
6% said don’t know.

Unfortunately the full report is not on the Barclay's Corporate site yet to read the detail

But I can’t help thinking that the ‘not well equipped’ label suggests that the experience and skills sets private companies believe civil servants to have, are either not appropriate, or that they feel civil servants lack certain key skills. ( A training Gap perhaps ?)


Some may surmise that Professional Selling Skills and a ' selling mindset ' might be amongst the ‘lack of equipment’ but as that fictional antihero Conservative Chief Whip, Francis Urquhart in the series "The House of Cards" often said

“You might very well think that but I could not possibly comment”