Working Mother magazine has released the list of the 100 best companies in terms of support they offer to working mothers.

The factors that the magazine considered when ranking the companies included flextime, telecommuting, parental leave, backup child care, and other family-friendly benefits.

There are four newcomers to the Best 100 list this year: Bain & Co., Dell, FINRA and Moffitt Cancer Center.

Deloitte is one of the companies that have been on the list for 15 years and have now been inaugurated to the Working Mother’s Hall of Fame.

Here are the 10 most family-friendly companies in 2008, in alphabetical order:

• Abbott
• Baptist Health South Florida
• Bristol-Myers Squibb
• Ernst & Young
• IBM
• KPMG
• The McGraw-Hill Companies
• Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman
• PricewatershouseCoopers
• S.C. Johnson & Son

To download the complete list, visit the Working Mother magazine website.

This year, the Consultancy Careers Fair will take place at the Barbican Exhibition Hall in central London on October 9th and 10th.

Visiting consultants will have the opportunity to meet recruiters from a wide range of consulting firms. The doors will be open to them on Thursday, October 9th (18:30 – 21:00) and Friday, October 10th (09:30 – 16:30).

To attend, book your ticket on the Consultancy Careers Fair website, where you can also find more information about the event. Spaces are limited, so make sure you register your ticket soon.

UK's leading management and IT consulting firms, including some of the world's best known consultancy brands, and a number of boutique firms will be sending their recruiters to the event.

The consulting firms that will exhibit at the 2008 Consultancy Careers Fair include Accenture, Axon, Consulting Point, Convergys, Dell Corporation, Deloitte, Detica, Ernst & Young, Gartner UK, Hitachi Consulting, IBM, Mindbench, Navigant Consulting, PA Consulting, PCubed, PricewaterhouseCooopers LLP, Proudfoot Consulting, Qedis, Tefen Ltd, and many others. More than 45 stands have already been booked and over 2,500 people are expected to attend the event.

The annual Consultancy Careers Fair is organized by career websites Top-Consultant.com and TopITconsultant.co.uk.

Career website Vault.com has released the new Vault Guide to the Top 50 Management and Strategy Consulting Firms. Consulting giant McKinsey & Company has taken the top spot for the eighth consecutive year.

The Guide is the result of the career site’s yearly Strategy Consulting Survey, which was conducted from February to April this year and included more than 4,000 consultants.

The consultants rated firms on a scale of 1 to 10 based on the firms’ prestige in the consulting sector.

Here are the top 10 consulting firms according to the Vault Guide:

1. McKinsey & Company

2. The Boston Consulting Group

3. Bain & Company

4. Booz & Company

5. Monitor Group

6. Mercer LLC

7. Deloitte

8. Oliver Wyman

9. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

10. L.E.K. Consulting

Three Big Four firms – PricewaterhouseCoopers (ranked #9), Ernst & Young (#11) and KPMG (#16) were reintroduced to the Guide. The firms had separated their consulting divisions from their accounting and audit arms at the turn of the century and, since the non-compete agreements between the firms and their spin-off consulting divisions ended in 2007, they have been hard at work rebuilding the divisions. As a result, the consulting services were the fastest growing service lines for all the three giants. Consequently, it made sense to add them to the Guide again.

Vault’s global consulting editor Naomi Newman said:

“Even though a lot of survey respondents are portraying these firms as coming back from the dead, and not yet integral to the strategy consulting market, there's a real sense that they are quickly getting reacquainted with the industry and asserting themselves accordingly. By virtue of them ranking so well in terms of prestige in their first year back gives us a glimpse into how other consultants view these firms and their potential. It will be interesting to watch their strategy and positioning develop in the market over the next few years.”

The Vault Guide also features company guides and quality of life rankings, with companies rated based on compensation, training, work hours, diversity, offices, etc. The Guide can be ordered at Vault.com.

Convergys Corporation, a relationship management solutions provider, reported this week that Willard W. Brittain has been elected to the company's board of directors, with effect from yesterday, as announced by Philip A. Odeen, non-executive chairman of the board of Convergys.

A director at Perini Corporation, Analysts International Corporation and DaVita Inc, as well as two non-profit boards, Brittain recently served as chairman and CEO of Professional Resources on Demand, an executive search, interim placement and business advisory firm, since March 2003.

Earlier, he was the chief operating officer of PwC Consulting, the information technology, process and strategy consulting business of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Brittain worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP for 28 years before his retirement, even serving as its chief operating officer.

Ernst & Young LLP moved into the number one spot on Universum USA's 2008 survey of IDEAL employers for undergraduate business students and jumped eight positions to number four among all undergraduate students. The survey, the largest of its kind in the U.S., included responses of more than 40,000 college students.

Ernst & Young rose up the undergraduate business student ranks this year from number three in 2007 to number one in 2008, surpassing Google and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The firm also ranked number one this year in a survey of students majoring in accounting and ranked the highest of all accounting firms on a separate Universum undergraduate survey focused on diversity.

"The Universum surveys are particularly important to Ernst & Young because they represent the views of such a large number of undergraduate students. We are proud that Ernst & Young is ranked number one among undergraduate business students and, more importantly, that we are communicating our culture and values in a way that is resonating," noted Nancy Altobello, Ernst & Young's Americas Vice Chair, People. "This recognition underscores the importance of giving students a full and realistic view of why our firm is a great place to work."

Ernst & Young will hire more than 5,500 students as interns or full-time hires this year. The firm has been recognized for its world-class internship program, innovative campus events, and ground-breaking recruitment strategies including a highly-trafficked group page on Facebook. This past year, the firm also launched Reel Influence, a campus video competition, and EY Insight, an interactive web tool available at www.ey.com/us/eyinsight.

Ernst & Young is one of FORTUNE's "100 Best Companies to Work For" and one of Businessweek's "Best Places to Launch a Career."

"Ernst & Young is the perfect example of how consistent and targeted efforts pay off when trying to attract this complex new generation," said Claudia Tattanelli, CEO of Universum USA. "Ernst & Young has been able to understand students' attitudes and values and find new high-tech high-touch ways to communicate with them effectively. The new campaign has resonated in their hearts and in their minds, and so has EY's presence on social networking sites, which has been successful without being invasive. Students are now rewarding EY for its efforts, for understanding them and for providing them with the tools they need to succeed."

About Ernst & Young

Ernst & Young is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. Worldwide, our 130,000 people are united by our shared values and an unwavering commitment to quality. We make a difference by helping our people, our clients and our wider communities achieve potential.

For more information, please visit www.ey.com.

Nearly one in five undergraduate students chose Google (17.1 percent) as their IDEAL (TM) Employer, the popularity of the leading search engine grew as only 13 percent of undergraduate students chose it as IDEAL (TM) in 2007.

Walt Disney (13 percent) comes in again at a close second followed by Apple Computer (10 percent), and Ernst & Young which jumped eight positions since 2007 to be No. 4, edging out the U.S. Department of State (9 percent).

Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, Peace Corps, NASA, and PricewaterhouseCoopers completed the top 10 list. This year, 43,313 students from 195 colleges and universities participated in the Undergraduate Edition of the Universum IDEAL(TM) Employer Survey, making it the largest survey of its kind in the U.S.

In it, students answered questions about their career expectations such as top industries, career goals, communication preferences, salary expectations, IDEAL(TM) employers and more.

The career goals of undergraduate respondents directly reflect attitudes about work and current economic and social events. An overwhelming 64 percent of students feel that a work-life balance is the most important career goal, job security and stability (45 percent) came second. Third on the list is being dedicated to a cause or to feel they are serving a greater good (44 percent) followed by being competitively or intellectually challenged (39 percent), and to be a leader or manager of people (33 percent).

"These savvy undergrads are thinking much more strategically than ever seen before," says Claudia Tattanelli, CEO of Universum USA. "They have seen massive layoffs first hand and are now looking beyond their top three companies to find more stable career choices that are inline with their career goals. In addition, they want to feel as though a work-life balance is achievable without letting it get in the way of their work. They ultimately want to work smarter not harder."

Working in an organization like the U.S Dept. of State allows undergraduate students to achieve top career goals like giving back to the community and their financial goals which is why government/public service remains the No. 1 industry. Healthcare came in second followed by accounting (public), education/teaching, and marketing/advertising. This year, undergraduate students are expecting, on average, $50,640 one year after graduation, and $96,438 after five years.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is marking the 10th anniversary of its establishment after the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand in 1998 with a unique joint project with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to raise funds to help build and operate schools for refugee children who have fled the conflict in Darfur.

Samuel A. DiPiazza, Jr., global CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers, said: “We have achieved much in the last 10 years and when our network works together we are able to accomplish great things. It seems fitting that we mark this occasion by celebrating PwC at its best - and harnessing the power of PwC to make a meaningful difference.”

Based on the recommendations of its Global Communities Board, PwC will partner with the UNHCR to raise funds to provide facilities and education on a sustainable basis at camps in Chad for refugee children from Darfur.

PricewaterhouseCoopers leadership has committed to contributing $200,000 to the effort, called the Power of 10, and the global PwC organisation is seeking additional contributions from its partners and staff as well as friends and family, with the hope that its global organisation will far surpass that amount. Each of the firms in the PwC network has been asked to participate in the Power of 10 campaign and to seek donations from the 146,000 PwC employees in 150 countries around the world.

The campaign will take place over 10 business days, from June 16 to June 27.

"The situation in Darfur is heartbreaking and the task facing relief organisations is overwhelming. By working with the UNHCR we can offer children the chance of a better life through education. We hope to make a substantial, long-term impact in an area of the world that desperately needs help,” DiPiazza said.

The programme, which PricewaterhouseCoopers is calling "The Power of 10," was developed by the UNHCR with PwC and builds upon PwC's long-standing charitable focus on education. The money raised by PwC will be used by the United Nations to build schools, train teachers and provide supplies and education to some 20,000 refugee children between the ages of six and 14.

The first phase will be completed within two years, and the project is planned to provide sustainable education to children for at least five years. The level of support provided by the people and firms in the PwC network will determine the number of refugee camps the programme will serve and the number of children it will reach.

The United Nations will oversee the programme and will provide ongoing progress reports. If conditions permit, PwC representatives will visit the camps, assess progress and provide assistance.

"The Power of 10 will help educate thousands of deserving Darfur refugee children. At the same time, PwC's contributions will give these children something more: A chance of a better future for themselves and their troubled region," said Antonio Guterres, High Commissioner for Refugees of the UNHCR.