Mobility is essential with clients based all around the UK and many graduates

Mobility is essential, with clients based all around the UK, and many graduates will work away, sometimes for weeks or months at a time.Who’s the boss? Dr Martin Read became the group chief executive in 2002. Graduate training lasts 12 months, but you’ll start by working on a real project, rather then spend weeks in [...]

Mobility is essential, with clients based all around the UK, and many graduates will work away, sometimes for weeks or months at a time.Who’s the boss? Dr Martin Read became the group chief executive in 2002. Graduate training lasts 12 months, but you’ll start by working on a real project, rather then spend weeks in a classroom.Top dollar? Salaries for 2006 haven’t been set yet, but this year the range was £17,500 to £21,750, depending on location.Beam me up Scotty? There are numerous examples of graduate recruits who’ve gone on to fill senior managerial and technical roles within the company. Your application is screened for evidence of some commercial work experience, team working and communications skills, and determination, maybe as a result of recovering from a setback somewhere in your life.These areas may be explored more thoroughly in a visit to an assessment centre, which sounds like a full day, as it includes an interview, a group exercise, a written exercise and two aptitude tests.If you’re picked, you’re invited back to the office to meet staff and learn more about the company before deciding whether you want to join. For graduate jobs, most will have at least a 2-2 in a computer science or other degree with a heavy numeracy and logic content, and a strong flair for IT generally.The recruitment process: All applications start online, at www.logicacmg /ukgraduates and, for next year, open in November. More than 6,000 people work for Logica in the UK.The office:The headquarters are in North London, between Euston Station and Regent’s Park, but at any one time, 50 per cent of UK staff are spread around the company’s regional bases, from Staines to Glasgow, and in clients’ offices.Is this you? Up to 200 recruits are taken on every year, including those on mid-course work placements. that some of my old miscellaneous drawings cannot be published”.

This exhibition would surely have delighted her.Beatrix Potter, ‘Artist and Illustrator’, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21 (020-8693 5254; www.dulwichpicturegallery .uk), to 22 January. What does it do? The company still colloquially known as Logica actually has a longer title, since the British firm, founded in 1969, merged with the Amsterdam-based CMG in 2002. They’re big players in the IT and digital communications business around the world: designing, building and managing big computer systems that run many of the things we do in our day-to-day lives, such as transferring money electronically around the corner, and around the world.
They’re behind the IT system that runs the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, and much of the background hardware and software that enables us to send texts.Vital statistics: At the end of last year, Logica employed 21,000 people across 34 countries, and turned over £1.66bn, making a profit of nearly £70m. “I think the best contradiction would be to get photographed along with a favourite cow or pig and get it inserted in some more genteel newspaper! I had lately a pig that continually stood on its hindlegs leaning over the pig sty, but it’s hanging up, unphotographed and cured now,” she writes, including a cartoon of the pig and a rather unflattering self-caricature.In 1920, Potter wrote wistfully, “it seems a pity … On one watercolour of Mrs McGregor, her publisher, Norman Warne, writes: “We still do not like the old woman’s face.

Will you please have another try at this.” Hobbs elaborates, “Her people weren’t very good.”In another incident, Hobbs recounts how the author’s original cover design had Peter Rabbit running on all fours. The publishers chose instead the now iconic image, dismissed grumpily by Potter as “that idiotic prancing rabbit on the cover”.Her dry sense of humour is evident elsewhere, in particular in a letter from 1924, where she vents her annoyance at being mistaken for the socialist Beatrice Webb in the Sunday Herald. Hobbs is particularly proud of the narrative sequence, “The Rabbits’ Christmas Party”, with its Renoir-esque umbrella scene, which Hobbs hopes to display in “cartoon-strip” form, “at full stretch” across the walls, to highlight Potter’s prowess as a narrative artist.The little books inevitably feature, with some rare gems among the familiar images, including pencil sketches of the original Peter Rabbit from 1899.The exhibition will highlight Potter’s keen involvement in all aspects of her books, including not infrequent spats with her publisher. As well her unpublished illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Hobbs has discovered that Potter paid tribute to John Tenniel. Her wool-shop scene in Little Pig Robinson echoes a scene from his illustrations to Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Watercolours of birds, bats, insects and amphibians and several fungi paintings are included, allowing visitors to add another dimension to the “whole woman” – Potter as natural historian and mycologist.”She must have produced about 500 fungus and lichen drawings, including microscopic studies that are very interesting scientifically,” says Hobbs, who believes Potter came close to discovering the antibiotic properties of penicillium mould in the course of her research.The second half of the exhibition will deal with Beatrix Potter as illustrator, a side more familiar to the public, but here too there are surprises. Similarly, time spent with her childhood pets was not merely idle play, but used for valuable anatomical research. Adjacent to a photograph of a convalescing Beatrix, cradling her pet dormouse, Xarifa, are her pen and ink sketches of the animal from various angles.As well as painting her domestic menagerie, Potter applied herself to cataloguing the natural world, particularly on holidays to Scotland and the Lake District. She was endlessly redoing and perfecting.”Potter’s approach to drawing, mixing pleasure with scholarship, is evident in the young artist’s work. Alongside a charming childhood sketch of “hares at play”, drawn for her younger brother, Bertram, is the teenage artist’s wooden paintbox, complete with meticulous notes on which colours to use for flower paintings. Filming for a Hollywood biopic, with Ren?Zellweger touted as the lead, begins in March.Anne Stevenson Hobbs, formerly Frederick Warne Curator of Children’s Literature at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and great-niece of the illustrator Arthur Rackham, has put together an epic exhibition of nearly 250 works, from Potter’s adolescent nature sketches through to the genesis of her little books and her later landscapes as well as photographs and tributes both to Potter and by Potter to other artists.Hobbs hopes that she has created a portrait of a life in paintings: “From the very beginning, you’ve got her enjoying the scientific approach as well as doing drawings for fun The other thing is her meticulousness and industriousness.

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