Adecco’s boss for a month

Graduate Mia Savic will compete against 50 international candidates in Adecco’s boss for a month competition.

Adecco's next young chief executive, chemical engineering graduate Mia Savic.

Chemical engineering graduate Mia Savic will compete against 50 international candidates in the Adecco chief executive for a month competition, after winning the Australian section.

The annual competition, in which a national winner spends a month being paid a blue-chip salary to work with the company’s international chief executive, attracted close to 1000 applications in Australia alone.

Savic has spent this month working full-time alongside the company’s Australian head, Ger Doyle.

She now will compete against international winners to spend a month working with a Fortune 500 company under the mentorship of Adecco chief executive Alain Dehaze.

In her Australian month, Savic has been training in areas of management including human resources and staffing, management concepts, finance and marketing principles, meeting clients and public speaking.

Of the 50 country winners, 30 were women.

Brand power

A ManpowerGroup Solutions survey of 750 jobseekers has found brand and reputation is important to millennials looking for a job, and most will study the company online before applying.

With consumer confidence low in sectors including banking and finance, ManpowerGroup says organisations have been trying to build their reputation and strengthen consumer trust to attract interest.

Young Australians are likelier to want to align with a positive culture than just applying for jobs randomly, compared with their international counterparts.

Of the respondents, 48 per cent said an employer’s brand and reputation were more important today than five years ago, with millennials the most brand-driven candidates.

Learning in bursts

Employee engagement survey company Reffind says the new trend of microlearning — where short training or information programs are delivered in less than four minutes — can be an effective way of keeping staff engaged. Reffind chief executive Rob van Es says the challenge lies in finding a balance between providing employees with training and ensuring productivity. He says companies that provide microlearning are 30 per cent likelier to improve year-on-year customer satisfaction scores.

“Mobile platforms are ideal to maximise the impact of microlearning,” van Es says.

“Enabling staff to use their mobile device to consume training information also increases the chances they’ll review and retain training materials, simply because they’re so easy to access and take so little time out of the employee’s workday. ”

Age no barrier

Half of Australian workers believe they will work as long as they can and retire when they want, according to ADP, a provider of payroll and human resources management services.

With the retirement age increasing to 67 by 2023, ADP says the Australian rate of 50 per cent planning to work beyond retirement age is lower than China on 76 per cent, India’s 65 per cent and Singapore’s 63 per cent, but not as low as Chile’s 44 per cent.

The report found 55 per cent of Australians thought they would be adversely affected by the raising of the retirement age.

It also found the ageing population, technological shifts and a change in traditional relationships between employees and employers were having a dramatic effect on the workplace internationally.

Australian workers were less eager than workers across the region to adopt new workplace technologies, with only 69 per cent of Australian respondents excited about the ability to do all of their work on a mobile device, compared with 82 per cent in India, 83 per cent in Singapore and 95 per cent in China.