Third Visit to the WP

This is my third visit to the Work Programme run by SEETEC. This time I was booked in for a two hour session on the virtual training environment. This is where we can get some training on basically everything involved in getting ready for work and applying for jobs.

They asked me to go through the online presentations for cold calling for jobs and good interview habits. The second part seems quite useful to me and I suppose the first may be useful depending on what sort of jobs you are going for certainly not in my case due to the type of organisations I apply to.

The Training

The training material is fairly straightforward stuff just a PowerPoint slide with a voiceover that is intentionally distorted so you can’t tell gender and I guess it makes it harder to pick up accents, very strange. As you wait patiently through the voice track at various intervals you have to click on videos broken into multiple parts that give you tips and what and what not to do.

All in all a good idea however the implementation is more than a little off. The first problem is that the videos are at least 15 years old, considering that these providers are being paid to help it would be nice if they used some of those profits to buy some training materials from the last decade. The problem with the age of the material is that a lot of it is no longer relevant and maybe a quarter of the things they suggest seem that they just wouldn’t be possible now.

And then there was the time, all in all I spent a little over 2 hours just sitting there clicking my mouse every now and then while watching this largely pointless material and of course listening to the strangely distorted announcers voice as they guided me through the material. I would add this was mandatory so I wasn’t going to raise a stink about it certainly not worth getting or having to fight a 4 week sanction.

The thing that annoyed me was that perhaps 10 minutes before I finished up I got a tap by one of the floating advisor types to say “Hey you can go as soon as you finish” I looked at the time on the computer and yep 2 hours had passed. There was no interview at the end to round things up or even to ask if what I had just watched made any sense or was in anyway useful to me moving from unemployment back into the workplace. It was the epitome of a ticking box episode and frankly I and everyone who attends these Work Programmes is worth more than that.

Anyway that is enough from me; feel free to join me next week when I attend the CV workshop which is another 2 hour mandatory activity to take place at the WP.