Business and Economics

By Helen Taylor, Head of HR at Instant Asking for a raise may fall outside your usual comfort zone but if you don’t ask it’s likely you won’t get what you think you are worth. Here are some tips on getting the raise that you feel you deserve. How often should you expect a raise? Let’s face it, we live in tough economic times at the moment. In the past it used to be the norm to expect a raise...

By Robert Sun It’s not often that an inner-city American school rises to the top of national rankings in academics, and yet Baldi Middle School in Philadelphia has beaten the odds— not just once, but multiple times. Its track record reveals some important insights for anyone concerned with improving the learning experience for children. In a nationwide online maths competition involving 6,000 schools in 45 states, Baldi ended the latest school year ranked #1, as students solved almost 20 million...

By David Willbe, Director in the Technology team at law firm DWF  Equity crowdfunding is experiencing a boom in publicity and popularity, but investors and startups alike must be aware of the risks when equity is involved. Prominent advertising by the likes of CrowdCube in recent months is a clear sign that crowdfunding has moved beyond being an advance payment for consumer products and become a mainstream investment model. But for all the hype, crowdfunding is not new. As long...

By Professor Christopher H. Bovis, Professor of International and European Business Law, University of Hull Inevitably, the question of UK membership of the European Union will be centred on two issues: The need for reform of EU institutions and the way the EU is governed The ability of the UK to influence EU decisions Reform is badly needed The European Union is malfunctioning. It has lost the zest of the “common market”,becoming instead a self-fulfilling prophesy of political union with disproportionally...

Satire by Jack Peat  Tech-giant Apple has announced it is to build a tax-free haven off the coast of America out of bags of its excess cash. The company has been confronted with a surplus cash headache of late and now finds itself in the compromising position of making more money than it can spend. But CEO and ‘money making monster’ Tim Cook has devised a devilish plan to create a new tax-free haven built from bags of cash that...

A new study has uncovered key trends on how patient we are as a nation, finding the internet may have had a role to play in our slipping tolerance levels. The survey of 2,000 people found a third of Brits now describe themselves as someone who has no patience generally and one in two Brits have become more impatient in the last five years. Those we love most are the more trying, the results showed, with respondents most likely to...

Written by Sharmin Cheema On the 28th of December 2014, air traffic control lost contact with AirAsia Flight QZ8501 an hour after the plane departed Indonesia for Singapore, after the plane “climbed at abnormal speed” in bad weather before stalling and crashing into the Karimata Strait, off the west coast of Borneo. All of a sudden AirAsia’s CEO, Tony Fernandes, found himself in a limelight so glaring post-MH370 and MH17 with a couple of nationals in the UK including The Guardian, the BBC, the Independent, and the Telegraph quick...

By Andrea Osborne, from cushion the impact If your desk needs a fast and furious makeover her are six successful tips to help you clean up your act. EMAIL SURGERY – Did you know we only use 20% of our emails correctly? Using emails inefficiently can drain our productivity. So organise them, create different folders for emails to keep all relevant messages together. This will enable you to find what you need a lot more quickly. Use filters so that...

2:30pm today (Friday 23rd) is the busiest time of year for job-hunters, research suggests.   Restless workers will be polishing their CVs later today after the third Friday in January was found to be the peak period for workers to complete job applications, search for new posts and tweak resumes.   The combination of post-Christmas debt, January blues and New Year resolutions combine today to create a ‘perfect storm’ of conditions where half of Brits in full time employment will scramble...