Am I Employable?

It is a question I find I am asking more and more these days after a string of recent and unfortunately unsuccessful interviews. Interviews are a tricky thing especially it seems when it comes to feedback, it is very difficult to get feedback in general and lately it seems that it is near impossible to get written feedback. Call me cynical but sometimes I feel the answers given over the phone or so generic that they remind me of politicians on talk shows, they could be read a dozen different ways. Certainly not every time but let’s say more than once.

Enough of that though the current state of employment etiquette is secondary to the problem of me not having a job. So what can be done to resolve that, there are a few go to things:

·         Unpaid work

·         New skills to improve your CV

·         Preparation for job interviews

·         Evening classes or classes

·         Pick up a temporary job

These are the suggestions and I have followed most of them the only I haven’t are the evening classes because they don’t offer anything I don’t have qualifications for in my area of work. Unfortunately you can’t make a huge change profession wise just using free evening classes and at my age and resources I don’t think that would have been possible.

Temporary jobs are a problem when talking about roles that are less than say 3 months, those if taken would mean I would be taking on even more debt thanks to the interesting way that unemployment benefits work in this country. It also makes part time work (of less than 30 hours) an impossibility which in this market really reduces the amount of available roles to apply for.

(UPDATE)

Checked through the local listings for Adult Learning stuff and the pickings are slim to say the least so it looks like I’ll just have to double down on interview prep.

Celebrating The Positives

It is nice to write about good things happening for a change, yes people I actually have a job interview. All I can say about it is that it is an administration role and it is local which makes it a lot more efficient on the wallet should I be successful than huffing it back and forth from London. Though actually the job interview was not the reason I was writing this post about celebrating the positive.

I recently attended MCM Comic Con in London to do some press work. It was something I had done before and I was definitely looking forward to going into it better prepared with like six months of planning to go into it. Planning for what you may ask, well when you do press events there are roundtables where you interview various actors, creators etc. with lots of press asking them questions and you need to record that. I can't do shorthand and I can't afford a decent video camera so my first time I used my phone to do the recording and it barely lasted the day especially with me also using it take some photos.

This time I went in there with some specialist equipment:

• £10 8gb sound recorded which is surprisingly good
• Digital Camera

That with my phone made things a lot easier though if I had a little more leeway in terms of budget I would probably have added

• Cheap used netbook
• Mobile phone external battery

 There is a lot of travelling time between home and Comic Con and it could have better been spent starting to do write-ups for my website. I can't quite get across how draining and how long transcribing stuff from audio takes. After awhile you get in the zone but you still do a little dance when you are done.

Anyway if you want to see what all that stuff was about you can click on the links below to go to some of my articles.

Interview with Amanda Righetti (Colony, The Mentalist)

Dark Matter Press Roundtable

There are more but that is just a taste and there will be some more coming out this week. Hope your life is moving along on a positive if not keep fighting.

So This is How Things Are Going

Personal Stuff

I'm on the Work Programme I thought I would share at least that much though I suppose depending on if SEETEC is as bad as it was last time then you may find me blogging about it nearly as much as a blog about TV which I think we all agree would be weird. Last time when it was the New Deal it was a very bad experience to say the least in fact I barely want to type about it suffice it to say they treated us like we were recently paroled convicts with brain damage who needed help on the job front, that or perhaps those kids in school who aren’t allowed in your normal classroom environment because they’d break shit up.

I’m published YA KNOW!!!

So yeah I got something published on Hypable.com again which was nice. I am not saying that makes me some amazing journalist as I think they will print anything regardless of content as long as you know it reads well and isn’t insulting or just a bunch of nonsense, what was good about getting the article out there is of course seeing some reaction to it. 4 comments since I last checked and I think likely it will stick around there but then 4 comments are most certainly better than none.

It is a review about Video Game High School from RocketJump.com

Read it here

Job Interview, Shmob Interview

Image provided by StockFreeImages

Yes it is that time again so even as I am writing this I am making notes on the questions I am likely to be asked at the interview. As far as I know this is just a straight interview as in one without an attached task which is pretty rare these days. I can’t be sure but there is no task mentioned in the invite and usually they are quite good about such things.

Wish me luck I’m bringing my A game as I really want to be through with this unemployment thing and get back to a job, something I can excel at.