Month: May 2018

Our Water Team at Advance TRS attended the Water Industry Achievement Awards at The Vox Conference Centre in Birmingham on Monday 21st May.

This event is a great occasion where all of the water companies come together to celebrate all the achievements in the water industry over the last year, with the opportunity to enter your own company for different categories to prove that you are the best in that area. The categories covered all areas including Customer Service, Drainage and Flood Prevention, Energy and Carbon, Water resilience, Engineering Projects, Most innovative use of an existing technology, Most Innovative New Technology of the year and so on. Of course, there were some overall awards which were Water Company of the year and Water Industry Contractor of the Year. There was a record-breaking number of entries and you can see the full list of winners here.

The awards night consisted of a drinks reception from 7pm followed by a 3 course meal and the awards. We sat with representatives from Severn Trent Water and a partner of theirs, Malvern Panalytical who were jointly nominated for an award – which they won! Congratulations to them and all of the winners! The night ended with a charity casino followed by drinks at the bar until the early hours of the morning.

This event was a brilliant opportunity to see this industry link together to celebrate all of it’s amazing achievements over the last year and to see how much hard work goes into each part of the water industry. It’s an excellent networking event and an all round great evening.

The team also went to Utility Week Live the next day which was at the NEC in Birmingham. This event includes a hall of company stands within the utilities industry, including green energy, utility providers, tech companies and various equipment manufacturers and more. The chance to explore the opportunities and threats of disruptive technologies and business models and of course, networking with 3,000+ utility industry colleagues and contacts. There was ongoing seminars for all the sectors and these along with the Keynote Speakers were also very interesting and it was brilliant to meet some of the VIPs of the day.

These two days were great for our Water Team and it was all very enjoyable and a great way to do some team bonding. We hope to catch up with the new people and companies that we met soon!

From the 25th May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation law takes effect. You’ve probably seen GDPR everywhere recently and that’s because it is a regulation in European Union law on data protection for every individual within the EU.

We know you may have a few questions about it and might want to know whether or not you need to prepare for it. We’ve put together what we know and will explain how it affects everyone who is registered with Advance TRS.

GDPR regulates the way personal data is treated or used within any organization who is subject to this information. Personal data is anything that can identify a person. You need to comply with the GDPR law if your company or organization has collected, stored, transmitted or even erased personal data. The old GDPR law will be replaced on the 25th May with the new one and there are some changes that have been introduced that everyone needs to be aware of.

What is Advance TRS doing to prepare?

We have updated our Privacy Policy and we will continue to be open and transparent about how and why we use your Personal Data. Our promise is to never pass your information on to any third party without your consent or to use your information for anything that you haven’t signed up for. Advance TRS Ltd. is dedicated to ensuring the privacy and security of all personal data it is required to retain. In light of the upcoming changes in legislation, the main board directors and senior managers have committed to a structured delivery programme.

The Advance TRS company structure facilitates transparent and compliant administration of the GDPR updates, this includes assigning responsibilities for Data Protection to a specific individual within the structure of the organisation. Through the implementation of defined processes and with a strong focus on managing risk, Advance TRS is committed to communicating openly with internal and external customers on how their personal data is collected and stored. This also includes a regular review of the accuracy of personal data held along with routine opportunities for this to be updated.

Advance TRS only process personal data that is essential to business operations or our continued compliance with government and regulatory bodies where we are required to achieve certain operational, vocational and administrative standards. All personal data is stored in a password-protected database located on an external server within a high-security data centre in the United Kingdom.

Data security is of paramount importance to Advance TRS as part of our protection from any data breaches. Systems are constantly monitored, audited and assessed to facilitate the detection of potential breaches.

To ensure you are receiving information critical to you, you can update your job alerts here.

If you would like to register with Advance TRS for tailored job alerts, a CV matching service, exclusive content and the ability to search for and bookmark jobs, you can do this by clicking here.

Women In Rail was a strong topic at our recent visit to Infrarail 2018 at ExCel London. The skills gap is an increasingly important issue worldwide and it is particularly noticeable in the rail industry, as we heard from Adeline Ginn at Infrarail in her presentation to us about Women In Rail. Here are a few facts and information highlighted from the Women In Rail talk.

Adeline started off her presentation with a quote from Sharmaine Lovegrove ‘If you don’t have a diverse workforce or product, sooner or later you won’t exist’ which really ties in nicely with Advance TRS’s core values as a recruitment company, and also goes with our internal recruitment beliefs.

It is proven that diverse teams work better and give greater innovation and creativity. UK statistics are as follows with women on the Board of Directors:

  • 42% higher return on sales in the UK
  • 66% higher return on invested capital
  • 53% higher return on equity

The perception of rail as a masculine industry has been identified as a big impact factor preventing women from joining the sector. Women seem to fall into rail by accident rather than by choice. Engineering is often a misunderstood role and girls as young as 7 years old have an unconscious bias misconception of rail. This is where Women In Rail are keen to make a change, helping children at a young age understand the sector fully before misconception sets in.

Here are some more surprising figures we gained from Adeline:

  • 16.4% of the workforce are women
  • 78% of this number are in non-manager roles
  • 2% are senior managers
  • 4% are engineers

Some challenges that Women In Rail have noticed and want to help change are Working practices (women might need flexible working and not long days) and recruitment targeting men.

Women In Rail have already started many initiatives to help with this, including a mentoring programme, networking events, networking platform, campaigns, an online hub for women and many others.

This year, they celebrated their first Women In Rail Awards which was a great success with over 130 attendees from across the rail industry. It showcased individuals, teams and companies (large or small) who in the last 5 years have done amazing work to improve gender balance, diversity and inclusion in the UK railway industry. We look forward to seeing the continued growth and success of this!

Advance TRS are committed to supporting diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We are careful to check for bias in our job adverts to ensure that women are not excluded. Within the recruitment sector, we realise that women and men even look at job adverts differently. If a job advert is published, sometimes it can be directed towards men just by the simple wording, which could put a woman off straight away and they may disregard it.

We believe in delivering the very best candidates for our clients. By excluding 50% of the workforce, you may miss out on the best person for the job. So it is our job to make sure we are including absolutely everyone possible into our candidate searches.

Explore our latest jobs here.

Some of the Advance TRS team had a chance to take a trip to Infrarail which was held at ExCel London between the 1st-3rd May this year. Infrarail is firmly established as Britain’s leading showcase for every aspect of railway infrastructure technology and expertise, with a strong reputation for attracting visiting managers, engineers and buyers at the highest level.

The marketing team travelled there on the 1st May and managed to sit in on a talk from Chris Grayling which was fantastic. He spoke about the strategy for the railway including passengers and freight. The general progress of the rail industry as a whole including expanding the UK network and plans to build overseas presence. He also spoke about the the current situations of Crossrail, HS2, CP6, North-South Line, Old Oak Common, Transplan upgrate, East-West Rail and Ealing North Junction. He then spoke about the plans for the next 5 years for rail.

After his speech, he then proceeded to answer a few questions from those who were in the audience. We have a video of his talk on our twitter page which we recorded live, if you want to have a listen you can click here.

Adeline Ginn, the founder of Women In Rail, presented in the Knowledge hub in the afternoon. It was great to hear her presentation which explained to us how she started Women In Rail on LinkedIn 5 years ago and how big this has now become.

She spoke about how having more women in the rail industry would help improve the business of rail by increasing return on sales, increasing return on invested capital and increasing return on equity. At the moment, only 16.4% of the rail workforce are women.

The company provide all sorts of support for women in the industry from networking events and a networking platform, to a mentoring programme and a professional algorithm and set up. We know how passionate she is about this and how much she believes in women having a platform to meet other professionals who understand exactly where they are coming from.

Both of these talks were inspiring and are keeping us up to date with what is going on in the rail industry!