Heather McGregor

Tap the wisdom of junior colleagues

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Work & Careers news every morning. While mentoring is all about giving advice to a younger or less experienced colleague, reverse mentoring sees the junior employee taking the lead. It…

Tackling big issues needs great minds and deep pockets

What problems do you want to solve? As school leavers across the country consider their choice of university and with the publication of the latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change, it is a question we must all ask with…

What recruiters want — and how to provide it

As a recruiter for 17 years, founder of an initiative to help graduates from black and minority ethnic backgrounds get good first jobs, writer of a career guide for women, and currently professor to 15,000 students, I have developed a keen sense of…

Rishi Sunak’s back-to-school fund

Rishi Sunak didn’t go to business school in the UK, preferring to study in California, but in the budget, he showed that he valued the UK’s business schools and was going to use them to help us exit the pandemic. You would expect me, of course, to be…

Watching Industry gives me banking flashbacks

Is Industry a suitable title for a television series set on the trading floor of an investment bank? Despite many years working in that environment, I never thought of it as being an industrial place. Perhaps the name of the BBC/HBO co-production is…

What tim’rous England can learn from tartan trauma

Think of me as the ghost of Christmas yet to come. Most of the UK population is preparing for the arrival of the tier system on Wednesday. Most? Yes, because some of us — all of us up here in Scotland — have been in tiers for a while. I have been…

Video calls are just the job for recruitment now

Twelve days ago, 150 million people participated in selecting someone for a job. It was a fixed-term, four-year contract on £304,000 a year, with a country house, helicopter and plane for personal use and a generous pension. Few of the people who…

We must take responsibility for our own future

So, did the government subsidise 80% of my pay while I was away from these pages? In my last column, on March 15, I was speculating about whether Covid-19 would stop Chinese students coming to study in the UK, and agonising over whether I had the…

I’ll miss my brilliant Chinese students if the virus stops them coming here

A skirt or trousers? Which should I wear? You would think with the stock market in freefall, university campuses around the world shutting (at the time of writing, ours in Scotland remains open) and a husband over 60 with a heart condition, I would…

When you’re about to go under the knife in France, don’t mention Brexit

The crutches have gone. Well, not gone exactly — I have put them in a cupboard in case I ever need them again — but, four weeks after my hip replacement, I no longer need them to walk. Having written about the operation before I went, I am now…

They made a film about collateralised debt obligations. It wasn’t a thriller . . .

What to do on date night? Mr M is not at all sure, but I have come to the conclusion, after 31 years of marriage, that it is all too easy to stay at home and forget to make any effort. Date nights are a good idea. Plus, at the moment, I need to make…

Let’s be radical – for your next Ned, specify no previous experience

My invitation arrived the same day that my daughter-in-law went into labour with my first grandchild. That didn’t distract me from noting that Paul Drechsler, chairman of Bibby Line and of the Non-Executive Director Awards judging panel, was inviting…

I’m graciously pleased to bang the gong for local heroes

You can take the girl out of Europe, but not Europe out of the girl. On January 31 at 11pm, I ceased to be a citizen of the EU. But on February 5 at 11am, I had a weapons-grade titanium prosthetic hip put inside me, proudly manufactured in France by…

What’s in a name? Well, just ask Greta, Meghan and Harry

Back in August 2018, “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (School strike for climate) was simply a slogan on a placard being held by a teenage girl sitting on the cobblestones outside the parliament building in Stockholm and refusing to go to school until the…

I’m not fleeing to France over Brexit, it’s just the lure of a cut-price new hip

Bonjour, mes amis. Greetings from France, to where I have decamped following the UK’s exit from the EU. No, I have not emigrated — though it is worth noting that a lot of us Brits have been getting a French passport of late. After years of very few…

Burns’s ability to switch from poetry to tax collecting is a lesson to us today

Wanted: bookkeeper, to work on a sugar plantation in Jamaica. Salary: £30 a year. How does that sound, as a job? The advertisement dates from 1786. The successful applicant was Robert Burns, who had been working as a farmhand without much success or…

I’m missing Davos but — sorry, Greta — not because it’s bad for the planet

Greta Thunberg is going to have to do without me this year. I hope she will cope. She will, at least, have the consolation that Donald Trump is coming along, probably to check up on her and make sure she is chilling out at a good old-fashioned movie…

Bonuses used to be simple: you paid people millions and they all complained

Is pay a female subject? I feel almost part of the establishment now that I am chairwoman of a remuneration committee. It is almost a cliché to be a woman on a board and carrying out this role. Last year’s Female FTSE Board Report from Cranfield…

There are so many trade bodies that they formed their own trade body

New year, new decade, new government. A new dawn for business in the UK? It has been a long time since all business was so dependent on any single government — and I include the financial crisis in this. As we leave the European Union, the nature of…

You can make your office Christmas gifts go with a bang. But do avoid guns

There are three days to go until Christmas, traditionally the time for my husband to make his annual complaint that he has no idea what to give me. We were married in December 1988, in Hong Kong — there are Christmas trees in the background of all…