A recent survey by Tact Personnel revealed how important holidays are.

Take a moment to consider how you view time off work. How important are regular breaks to you? How does your boss feel about you taking your holiday entitlement?

Britain has a long standing culture of long hours, with very few bank holidays to punctuate the long, long working weeks. Tact questioned 100 employers and found out that the awarded annual leave entitlement. It discovered that 55% of employers offered 20 days holiday and 16% offered 25 days annual leave.

This has a direct result on employee’s morale and health. It is proven that regular breaks improve performance. It would be interesting to find out how many people also do not use their full annual leave entitlement. Many employees feel that they are letting the department down if they use the full holiday allowance. Having a break can be seen as a sign of weakness in some industries and companies.

When looking for a new job, the whole package of benefits that an employer offers has to be considered. Very few firms offer increased annual leave allowance with increased length of service. Therefore it is natural that candidates are thinking about annual leave before even applying for jobs.

Tact discovered that 71% of staff questioned described annual leave as “extremely important”. This shows that employees look at the benefits package as a whole.

Here at CV Master Careers we have received a number of enquiries from people wishing to totally change career direction. Many of our clients are seeking a better work life balance. If required, we can research and investigate comparable benefit packages anonymously and discuss our findings with you.

An example of how a better benefit package can make an employer more attractive, is the public sector. In the late 1990’s the public sector had difficulty attracting quality candidates, due to the perception that they offered low salaries and long working hours.

Since 1998, however, public sector staff numbers have increased by 658,000. Perhaps, other companies could follow this example. Until then, read your contract fully and take your full leave entitlement.