Part Time Or Full Time: The Thousand Pound Question. by Richard Taylor Edwards

Deciding whether you wish to work full time of part time is one of those fairly vital questions that you have to sort out before you enter the recruitment process. The client director at Talisman is not really going to be all that overjoyed to find that the prospective COO he was about to send to interview for a full time post actually only wants to work part time: your wanting to work full time and applying for a part time position would also be somewhat unhelpful.

Of course in the modern world we'd all like to have the life work balance that being able to switch around working hours would bring. There are many who would like to have full time hours during the children's term time for example, moving to more part time hours during the holidays. Unfortunately, the demands of the business make such flexibility extremely difficult to obtain.

Even when there are schemes available to work part time, perhaps in a job share (one version of which is that, to take an example, two mothers of young children share a job between them), making sure that the hours on offer are the same as those desired can be very difficult.

The most important thing to understand though is not the basic lifestyle choice that is being made: more time for family or other interests against a full time job and the income that brings. No, rather, the ?'£ 1000 point is that part timers will be paid less per hour of work they do than full timers. This has been flagged up in innumerable governmental reports as one of the reasons for the persistence of the gender pay gap and is ritually decried as part of the conspiracy against women.

However, as the more astute of those reports have pointed out it actually costs more to employ part timers than full timers. Both will need the same amount of training for example, the overheads and management time necessary will be very similar. So out of the pot of money that the company has to spend on getting a certain amount of work done, part timers will see less in their pay packets, over and above the lower hours, as a result of those extra expenses.

The Talisman recruitment consultants do of course deal with part time jobs, with jobshares even, but it is important to note before making the decision about changing the work life balance that there is nothing unfair about part time jobs not paying as much as full time pro rata. It's not discrimination, it's economics.

Richard Taylor Edwards, Managing Director of Talisman Executive Resourcing, the leading employment agency that offers employment opportunities in UK.

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