News in brief
THE gap between London and Leeds salaries will continue to rise according to a market analyst.
In London, the average salary shown in job advertisements is £41,079 whereas the average in Leeds, over the last six months, the corresponding figure has been £31,550.
The Leeds figure was calculated from almost 10,000 advertisements monitored by the jobs search engine AllTheTopBananas.com.
Dave Martin, spokesman for the website, said: “We are continuing to forecast rises in average salaries and a growing gap between London and the rest of the UK.”
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A FUNDRAISING challenge which sought to find Yorkshire’s most enterprising people has raised close to £2,500 for children’s charity Barnardo’s this week.
The event was organised by a group of rising stars at the Leeds office of Grant Thornton, and saw teams pit their wits against each other in a battle to generate as much money as possible within two hours.
The challenge was open to all professionals in the early stages of their careers, and 12 teams took part. The team which raised the most money was quick off the mark securing premium raffle prizes from top restaurants and bars, in addition to tempting many of Grant Thornton’s 250-strong staff with cakes and cookies.
Sarah Goodman, assistant manager at Grant Thornton in Leeds said: “We are delighted with the amount the teams managed to raise for Barnardo’s. Obviously Leeds is full of strong entrepreneurial minds!”
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WOMEN from across Yorkshire have been selected to attend an intensive programme to launch their own businesses and boost the number of successful female entrepreneurs helping to build Britain’s enterprise economy.
The year-long Flying Start Programme, designed and delivered by the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE), takes place in Sheffield with a three-day residential course to build on the fledgling business ideas of the region’s most promising female graduate entrepreneurs.
The event follows the enormous success of the first Flying Start Programme for Women, which also took place in Yorkshire in January this year. That pioneering programme saw 1,200 women compete for just 60 places, demonstrating the huge interest among young female graduates in starting their own businesses.
A national survey conducted this year by the NCGE amongst female graduates and current final-year women university students, all of whom aspire to run their own businesses, revealed that eight out of ten were inspired by a passion for business.
The survey results are based on the responses of 700 female graduate entrepreneurs who responded to the questionnaire while applying for the Women’s Flying Start Programme in York in January this year.
