To be seen as a distinctive firm, we need people with truly distinctive skills and experience.

The search for talent

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During 2007, over 69,000 people applied for roles with us in the UK – more than 3,000 of whom were successful. That figure comprises around 1,000 students and more than 2,000 experienced hires, 13 of whom were direct-entry partners.

Because we offer a wide range of services to our clients – from audit and tax to corporate finance to performance improvement consulting – we cast our nets wide when searching for talent.

Our student recruitment programme continues to lead the marketplace. For the fourth successive year, we were voted the UK's top graduate employer in The Times Top 100 List of Graduate Employers, where we were also voted Employer of Choice in the Accountancy Sector. In addition, we were named the ideal company to work for and the company that offered the best opportunities in student surveys by Universum and Trendence.

Our One. For All campaign has helped us attract and recruit graduates from a broad range of degree disciplines and over 80 universities. This campaign also features specific initiatives to help our message reach students from ethnic or other minorities.

In 2007, we were proud to see the first group of 38 students graduate from our Flying Start programme. A tripartite arrangement between PwC, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and the University of Newcastle, this pioneering scheme is a specially designed four-year course that integrates study with paid work experience and offers an accelerated route to qualification as a chartered accountant.

When seeking more experienced people, the first place we look is within our own firm. This allows us to continue our people's development and improve connections across the organisation. During the last 12 months, we promoted 1,277 of our people (2006: 1,218). At the start of the year, we appointed 52 new partners from within our own ranks. On 1 July 2007, we promoted a further 56 new partners.

A unique experience

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We want our people to take the opportunity to move around our organisation and engage with different ideas, cultures and clients. So, it has been good to see high levels of secondment activity, both within the UK and internationally, in 2007.

To support this mobility, we recently launched Helix, an integrated programme designed to provide our people with new opportunities both inside and outside the firm. An important element of this is our international assignment programme, which helped some 782 people find assignments to or from the UK. As our clients become increasingly international, it is essential that our people gain international experience and are able to respond effectively to the demands of globalisation.

In the last year, voluntary staff turnover was 12% – a remarkably low figure given today's highly competitive marketplace. At the same time, we continue to invest in our popular alumni programme. We are delighted that so many people wish to stay in contact with the firm and that such a large number of them choose to return to us, either as clients or recruits.

We conduct our YouMatter staff survey on a quarterly basis. In 2007, 95% of the people who completed the survey said that they were 'proud to be associated with PwC' (2006: 96%).

YouMatter, which has been running since 2002, is now thoroughly embedded in our business. Throughout 2007, the response rates never fell below 70% – clear evidence of the importance our people attach to the survey. It has proved an invaluable source of information that has helped us improve our business in numerous ways. Nonetheless, we are always looking for ways to enhance the survey and thinking about how we should be responding to its results.

We have been giving careful consideration to how we can help our people get the most out of their lives and their careers. Rather than talk about achieving a 'work-life balance', we prefer to pursue a practical approach that aims to establish sustainable working patterns. This means supporting people to achieve the right mix between work and other important elements of their lives, based on their personal and career priorities.

We take a keen interest in our people's health. Part of our Health Matters programme, the zest for life campaign aims to encourage all our people to choose a healthy lifestyle. It encompasses a diverse range of activities, including healthier catering, fitness and sports activities, an employee assistance programme and health awareness features. The Fit for Life course, which is open to all staff, focuses on nutrition, fitness and stress management.

Including everyone

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We seek to treat our people as individuals. We want everyone to feel that they are welcome here.

As part of our commitment to creating a more inclusive organisation, we have been encouraging the development of people networks for some years. These networks bring people together around common issues and offer them personal support as well as guidance, learning and development. Some of the networks, such as PwCwomen, are now so well established that they produce their own annual reports.

GALE, our gay and lesbian group, has established contact with various organisations with similar networks. Over the last year, we sought the assistance of Stonewall to help us look at the issues that gay and lesbian people face in our profession and review how we operate.

We have established a Diversity Assembly that meets on a quarterly basis. The forum enables the leaders of our staff and religious networks to come together with diversity champions from throughout the firm to discuss items of mutual interest.

Our work in this area has been widely recognised. We were particularly pleased to achieve the top, Platinum, status in the Business in the Community Opportunity Now benchmarking survey of women in the workplace.

Developing distinctiveness

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Our people have a wide variety of aspirations and abilities. The challenge for us is to match those aspirations and abilities to the many opportunities available within the firm.

Sometimes, this can mean deliberately building variety and challenge into an existing role or, perhaps, gaining experience of an entirely new area of our firm. Such insights bring real value to our people and to our clients, who know that, when push comes to shove, experience counts.

We recently created a new development framework to help our people make the most of their opportunities. This identifies six principles of development: training; variety of work; moving between different and challenging roles within the firm; giving and receiving regular feedback; high-quality coaching; and, through this, achieving a higher degree of self-awareness.

This is not development for its own sake. By encouraging our people to invest in long-term relationships, see the world from our clients' point of view, collaborate and share, and seek to deliver value, we believe that we can provide a truly distinctive service and make a real difference to our clients.

In the past, we have run a range of development programmes for people whom we believe have particularly high potential. In December 2006 we introduced the Emerging Leaders Programme, with places for more than 60 people nominated from across the firm, which seeks to accelerate participants' development as leaders and equip them to handle complex leadership challenges.

More than 240 people from all parts of the firm enrolled for the PwC Diploma, which is now in its second year. Run in conjunction with the Centre for Management Development at the London Business School, the four-year course offers a broad range of modules in areas such as leadership and business, governance, ethics and social responsibility. As an alternative, each of the diploma's modules can be undertaken on an individual basis.

Development has to be about more than just courses and training. The value of on-the-job learning can never be overestimated. Consequently, we are determined to instil a stronger coaching culture throughout the firm. We believe that all our people should make the most of their skills and experience by acting as coaches and taking responsibility for their colleagues’ development.

It is also vital to see the world from other perspectives. To that end, we are encouraging our people to seek experience outside the traditional realm of client service – whether through secondments to clients, other part of the business (both in the UK and overseas), one of our leadership programmes or our Community Affairs work.

Over the last year, three of our partners participated in Ulysses, a global programme that allows PwC partners to help with community schemes in developing countries. Recent examples include a municipal waste project in Peru and a HIV/Aids project in Cameroon.

The forward agenda

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So, there is much to celebrate. At the same time, however, there is still much to do.

In 2007, we achieved eighth place in the list of the Top 20 Best Big Employers in The Sunday Times Best Companies awards – a rise of six places over the previous year. While this was certainly a strong move in the right direction, we set ourselves extremely high standards and aspire to do even better.