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John Wiley plans to make 45 redundancies in the UK as part of a cost cutting and efficiency improving exercise.
A consultation, which will last at least 30 days, started earlier this week at Wiley’s Chichester office in the company’s scientific, technical, medical and scholarly division. Within STMS, the areas affected are journal and book content management, global purchasing plus content management services.
Following the consultation period, any redundancies will be made between February and June of 2010. Wiley employs around 1,400 in the UK alone.
The work will be outsourced to Wiley’s Singapore-based offices where the company already has a “significant presence”. It’s not clear yet whether new jobs will be created there or whether the work will be absorbed into existing roles.
Associate director of corporate communications, Julia Lampam, said there was a need to be “vigilant” over costs in the current economic climate. However, she argued that it would be a mistake to view the planned redundancies as purely a cost cutting measure.
Lampam said: "It’s really to expand the ongoing globalisation of the content management operations - reducing the number of locations to achieve efficiencies.”
She added that currently journal and book content management, global purchasing plus content management services, are “managed out of eight locations around the world which isn’t the most efficient approach”.
A further 15 jobs may go at the group’s Melbourne office - Wiley has two main Australian offices based in Melbourne and Brisbane.