Chanced on this thread purely by accident, and feel I must respond to some of the very negative comments directed at Cerco.
I was made redundant early 2010, made my way on my own for 12 months, and then signed with Cerco.
Here's what happened, it's very simple. I was given training for 2 weeks, the staff at their HQ in Crewe were always friendly and courteous, the gentlemen delivering the training were excellent and very competent and I saw no evidence of Gordon Geckoesque salespeople.
Bearing in mind my knowledge of IT was next to nothing, apart from a brief spat with ZX Spectrums back in the day, unsurprisingly I found I now knew more, who'd have guessed? Within a couple of weeks I was packed off to Fujitsu in Birmingham somewhere and given further training by the people there....all this had cost me nothing so far incidentally.....And I was placed on a contract upgrading systems in Specsavers shops up and down the country, initially I was placed with engineers who were fully conversant with the shops systems and eventually in a short space of time I learnt the job sufficiently well to begin mentoring other new engineers. It was certainly more money on a daily basis than the minimum wage; I'm not suggesting for one moment that I was going between jobs in an Aston Martin, however it was significantly more than the £70 a week I could have claimed on jobseekers allowance.
So problems, none, at any time with Cerco, honestly they were great, always accomadated my complex family situation and I genuinely liked the people that worked there .....Note I am aware they are an agency. Having worked in an agency many years ago, I am completely aware how they generate profit..If you have a problem with their or any other agencies methodology, don't sign on with agencies, it's really that simple, though most agencies don't give you two weeks free training.
Problems began when I and other engineers began a temp to perm contract with Fujitsu as IT engineers, I hasten to add that the problems were not with Cerco, but with the global supercompany itself. Financially I was better off on the temp portion of the contract when I was still employed by Cerco, receiving overtime payments and having access to a realistic easy to claim expenses model.
However when we were eventually taken on by Fujitsu (FJ), after many months of needless mucking about on their behalf, it was discovered by myself and the other engineers that the contracts we were expected to sign were restrictive in the extreme, tied us to unreasonably long working days with zero overtime (until we'd completed our annual hours agreement, overtime was then payed at flat rate), weekends, bank holidays, xmas, new year were all payed at flat rate, we could be asked to work nights or other unsociable hours at a moments notice, for guess what? flat rate.
Amidst all the pointless whining on the several hundred emails that went between the equally whining individuals sending them, calling for industrial action and work to rule nonsense, FJ's attitude being pretty appalling to it's new staff, existing long term engineers attitude being equally appalling to us as well, threats of violence on their behalf ending in a fairly ridiculous swearfest on two occasions...good eh?
Amongst this less than happy working environment I became increasingly ill, and eventually walked away from the job one sunny November morning, my sanity restored for a little while at least.
I would finally like at this point, to thank those whining people for dragging mine and an equally silent colleagues name into your email debates, for which incidently, we were marked as co-conspirators adding additional pressure to an already unhappy situation ....and would like to make it very clear, that logically and very obviously the fault lay with FJ, who undermined the professionalism of some very talented individuals and reduced their value to less than that of factory labourers...no disrespect, I've done that job and it was better paid and more appreciated than the work I carried out for FJ.
I think I recognise a couple of names on here, the style of writing reflects the emails that flitted around....I hope you've found alternative employment now, I suspect you won't be happy there either, no pleasing some people I guess
warmest regards
Nick Harrison
Back at Uni studing History and Lit if it's all the same to you
