Human Resources Review
Our people

Atkins' success depends on attracting and retaining the most talented professionals in their respective fields and providing an environment in which they are able to apply their skills on a variety of complex projects.
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Overview

Atkins succeeds to the extent that we are able to attract and retain the most talented professionals in their respective fields and provide an environment in which they are able to apply their skills and experience in addressing our clients' varied needs. This means that being an employer of choice is a prerequisite in what remains a competitive environment for the best staff. We are proud of our record in meeting this challenge but recognise it requires a continual focus.

We measure our performance in various ways, partly by the breadth and depth of the skills and capabilities of our people but also by tracking a number of metrics which are integral to our management of the business. These include retention, employee engagement and the composition of our workforce. We also take careful account of the views of our staff expressed via internal and external surveys, with the latter resulting in a number of awards.

Headcount

Headcount growth in the first half continued the trend of recent years with strong growth in most parts of the organisation, followed by action in the second half to adjust our resources to reflect the changed economic environment.

In the eight months from April to November 2008 headcount, including agency staff, increased by 8% to a peak of over 18,600. From November 2008 to March 2009 there was then a reduction of circa 600 staff (3.2%) reducing headcount to 18,017. Once allowance is made for staff under notice then the underlying headcount reduces to circa 17,400. These reductions were mainly in the UK and Middle East building design businesses and in Faithful+Gould.

Every effort has been and continues to be made to redeploy staff and, whilst a significant number of colleagues have left the business as a result of restructuring, many others have been redeployed successfully to other parts of the business where we continue to see growth in demand for skilled staff. We are recruiting to fill specialist roles across the Group, notably in nuclear, oil and gas, power and aerospace.

We had 300 graduate trainees joining in the year and, although we have reduced our target to 150 for the year ahead, we remain committed to those on our graduate programme. For the fourth year in succession we were awarded the Most Popular Graduate Recruiter in the Construction and Civil Engineering category at the Target National Graduate Awards. This award is based on feedback gathered through an online campus survey of 90,000 undergraduates over a four-month period ending in January 2009 (the largest of its kind in the UK).

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