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It's good to, um, er ...

Nearly 80 per cent of small and medium-sized enterprises in London say that today's graduates are lacking motivation and drive, with nearly 90 per cent citing communication skills as needing the greatest improvement. The report, "Graduates in Growing Companies: The Rhetoric and Reality of Globalisation", commissioned by Focus Central London Training and Enterprise Council and the research organisation Create, blames inadequacies in national education and training for inadequate skills and aptitudes among graduates.

IBM says IT boosts GDP

By 2002, 1m people in the UK will be employed in computer-related jobs, according to research from IBM. The survey suggests that the IT industry had sales worth pounds 22.7bn in 1997, accounting for 2.4 per cent of gross domestic product, and claims a tenth of the new jobs created in the current economic recovery were in the computer sector.

Diff'rent strokes

Diversity is good, says the Institute of Personnel and Development, which is holding its annual HRD Week conference and exhibition at London's Olympia this week. The institute is publishing "Tools for Managing Diversity", a collection of techniques developed and tested by Oxford-based occupational psychologists Pearn Kandola. The document claims there is a growing recognition of the value of diversity in the workplace and offers ways to put this into practice.

First among equals

The Government hopes to boost equal opportunities in the NHS with the launch this week of the NHS Equality Awards. The awards will be open to any team or individual in the service who can show how they have translated the principle of equal opportunities into their work to good effect.

My one's bigger than yours

Human resources departments are in danger of becoming inflexible and ineffective if they become slaves to performance indicators and measurements, according to a report from the Industrial Society published this week. The organisation says HR professionals try to justify their role by adopting such "hard" business methods as benchmarking their effectiveness compared with their counterparts in other organisations, but often fail to ask staff how they feel about such practices.