HR Zone and TrainingZONE frequently publish articles of wide interest to an HR and Training audience, and we welcome submissions from all members of those communities.

The following notes are intended for guidance to people and organisations wishing to submit articles for possible publication.

General Guidelines

All submitted articles are free to be edited by editorial staff of Sift Group Limited, HR Zone or TrainingZONE and the person or organisation submitting such articles relinquishes all rights to editorial control for the publication on Sift community sites.

The person or organisation submitting the article(s) confirms permission to reproduce their copy and any included pictures, free of payment and indemnifies and releases HR Zone, TrainingZONE, Sift Group Ltd and their staff and agents from any claim, financial or otherwise, and liability, legal or otherwise, resulting from the publication of the submitted material on any Sift community site.

Article topic and length

Submitted articles should have an appeal to an audience of Human Resource and/or Training professionals and decision makers. Topics may have a specialist (narrow) audience or a generalist (broader) audience. The emphasis is on the quality of the information and opinion being given. The tone of any submitted article should avoid personal and/or verbal attacks on either people or organisations, although it is accepted that critical analysis of opinions and actions is a justifiable public interest content.

Article length should be no more than 800 words but it is recommended that an optimun length would be in the range of 300 to 500 words. Longer articles could be submitted as a short series.

Serialised articles would normally be published on a weekly schedule but this is open to discussion with editorial staff.

Our experience is that regular article submission is more beneficial to the contributor in raising their name awareness and influence in the market place.

Avoiding Promotional Content

The Internet is a developing communication medium widely used for commercial purposes. We do not endorse unpaid advertising and/or ‘business promotions’ in any way, nor do we draw attention to them.

Advertising and ‘business promotions’ are defined as including:

• explicit mention of own company name for promotional purposes
• inclusion of own contact details as an invitation to be contacted to discuss business
• special offers to our members, advocating use of own services
• any implicit or explicit expression that the contributor or his or her business or associates expects to be paid.

Submitted articles may contain a source acknowledgement at the foot of the article. (- author and company name, and hyperlink to contibutors site or the contributor’s directory entry in the HR Zone or TrainingZONE providers’ directory or suppliers’ directory at our discretion) We would particularly encourage contributors to make a complete entry in the HR Zone Who’s Who – Members’ Directory and the TrainingZONE Who’s Who – Members’ Directory). Article contributors can then advise editorial staff that they have such an entry and additional biographical data (and photograph if submitted) will be linked from the submitted article when published.

People or organisations wanting to advertise to the 32,000 members of the TrainingZONE and HR Zone communities are referred to our advertising advice pages.

Alternatively, contact our staff by telephone at 0117 915 9600 or by
e-mail

Contacting HR Zone and TrainingZONE

Articles for submission to TrainingZONE or HR Zone should be sent as an e-mail (preferred), or an e-mail attachemnt in either .txt (Microsoft Notepad or Wordpad) or .doc (Microsoft Word) file format.

Graphic files (pictures) for inclusion within the article should be submitted in either .jpeg or .gif format, and should be sent as separate attachments (i.e. not embedded within another file such as Microsoft Word document). A declaration that any submitted graphic file can be used free of copyright, royalty or any other payment may be requested.

All e-mail attachments will be virus checked against latest advised virus databases, but it should be noted that any file containing macros is likely to be deleted from our system without being read.

Please remember that despite the ‘legal’ tone of this guidance, we really do welcome your articles and opinion, and are keen to help. Please send any articles and queries to [email protected] or [email protected].