Last modified on Thu 4 Mar 2021 05.02 EST
Birmingham, with its proud manufacturing heritage, has been hit hard by the Covid jobs crisis and is in the unhappy position of being among one of the areas with the highest unemployment rates in the country at 7.8%.
Five of the 10 constituencies with the highest level of unemployment in the country are in Britain’s second city, and average gross weekly pay currently sits at £548.60 – below the averages for the wider West Midlands region and for Great Britain.
In a scene repeated up and down the country, lockdown has left the city centre deserted – a particular blow for Birmingham. The city had bet big on high street retail in recent years with the redevelopment of the Bullring, known for the undulating silver facade of the Selfridges department store at its heart, and a shopping centre built as part of the overhaul of New Street station, featuring a vast new John Lewis .
Is working from home a future you re on board with?
Credit: Morsa Images/Digital Vision
Over the past year, the UK has moved from barely six per cent of its workforce regularly working from home to over 50 per cent – a shift that home-working advocates have been pushing for decades.
But after being forced onto lots of us through a global pandemic, this is likely coming to an end; yesterday Howard Dawber, head of strategy at Canary Wharf Group, told Radio 4’s
Today programme that “from March 29 onwards I think we will see people starting to return to the workplace”.
“There is a lot of fatigue out there,” the head of the financial complex said, adding that while he expected numbers of on-site workers to return to pre-pandemic levels, flexible working may continue, “which would be a good thing.”
For Ula Maria, a childhood in Lithuania steeped in nature was the launch-pad for youthful success
19 March 2021 • 1:04pm
Author Ula Maria is an expert at designing gardens, from small back yards to grand lawns
Credit: Rebekah Kennington
Ula Maria, who is 27, lives in the kind of shared flat one might expect of someone her age. A sprawling mass of corridors and bedrooms above a shop, on a busy thoroughfare in South London, the dimly lit living room (no television, but several house plants) looks out at an artisanal burger restaurant.
It has no outdoor space, but the coffee table books – well-loved tomes on taxonomy and Piet Oudolf – belie her profession as a garden designer. “I feel a bit of a fraud, designing all these spaces without a plot of my own,” she tells me. “I’d love to see something actually evolve all the time myself. I’m desperate for a garden.”
March 01, 2021
123rf
Decisions, decisions.
With the way the coronavirus pandemic has steamrolled through all of our grand plans for 2020, it s high time we rethink what we re going to do with 2021.
Going back to school for postgraduate studies seems pretty attractive as of late.
Regardless of whether you re from the class of 2020 or someone looking to pivot out of a stagnant job, a postgraduate degree presents a door to unlocking better prospects for yourself in a highly competitive job market, by allowing students to specialise, retrain and develop new skills in an efficient manner.
Still, the price tag might make you drag your feet, so here are some reasons why you should take that plunge.
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