Essentially I am looking for a job and would like some help.
Specifically I am looking for a job in a software/hardware development
company and would like to be directly integrated in the design
process. It would help if the answerer knows about companies in this
field and also what is involved in usability consultancy. With this in
mind heres some background:

I am currently a usability consultant based in London, UK, and I have
an MSc in 'Human Computer Interaction'. My job role for the past year
in the consultancy has essentially been running usability studies for
client products, mainly websites/mobile devices that are either
currently on the market or at a late stage of development and due for
imminent release. Whilst the work is not bad, I feel that the actual
value of it is useless - usability studies run at this late stage of
development typically come up with such trivial recommendations such
as 'change the name of this button' etc.., and are typically added on
by project managers at the client companies at the very end of the
projet because they suddenly realise that 'oh, maybe we should do some
usability'. I want to be more involved in the development processes at
an early stage, working for an actual design team. To be more
specific, I want to be involved with things such as requirements
gathering, functional specification documents and prototyping
activities. I would also be happy to work with usability activities,
but so long as it is integrated into the design process and i can be
exposed to how the development process works.

Now I essentially have 2 problems:

1 - I dont know enough uk based (preferably london based) companies
that are involved with this type of activity and 2 - whilst my course
taught me about the processes in design, it did not teach me the
actual skills themseleves (e.g. prototyping, authoring specifications
etc.)so i essentially feel underqualified to apply for positions
typically seen on recruitment sites such as 'specifications engineer'
etc.

So I am essentially looking for a 'way in' to this side of things and
would like to know from you what you consider to be my best bet. Here
are a list of questions which i dont expect to all be answered
individually but they just give a feel for what i want from your
answer: What specific companies should i be looking at? Does anyone
offer training schemes? If there is no way any companies would be
interested in me given that i lack these skills, where can i learn
them?

If you could give me some idea of what my best bet is, and indeed,
whether it is even possible for me to pursue this avenue given my
experience that would be great. Even better would be if you could give
me specific leads to follow up (e.g. "Happy Software inc. is currently
recruiting graduates in a design role etc..).

Thanks.