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.

What Scares You? Taking A Risk?

Things are not looking rosey at the moment career wise, I am feeling more and more pressure at the Job Centre now with weekly pointless meetings were I am left in no doubt about how little my advisor thinks of me asking me the same old questions each week. I half think they are looking for me to have a blowup so I can get sanctioned or something. According to the advisor there are no end of jobs in my field in the local area and everyone wants to hire someone who has been out of work for 5 years.

I can think of few things that are more likely to put someone off doing their best to find work than condescending job coaches (which I think is their proper title???). Anyway it has been clear to me that as well as pounding the virtual pavement of the job boards I need to look at other ways of creating cash. I was talking to a friend who definitely personifies that man of all seasons thing and he suggested I take a look at Teespring and see if I can run a successful campaign through it.

Other ideas might be to put up my comic collection for sale, I'd would feel bad selling it off at this point but in reality it has been more than a decade since I collected comics with any regularity and I haven't had access to them in about the same amount of time, they are all boxed up so I am stuck in that I really need to take a look at them research whether or not they are worth anything and take pictures and the like before I put them up for sale.

So subject to work commitments next weekend at Comic Con and all the transcribing after I am going to be working on some designs for T-shirts then maybe I will put them up for a poll or just consult some people who I respect to see which one I should go with. Obviously I need to make a brand to put them under at least on that I have some ideas.

Feelings Of Limbo

An unsuccessful job interview has left me a bit dazed and confused. Maybe I should be used to unsuccessful interviews but that is a scary thing to get used to it feels a lot like giving up. I have been looking to more local roles as scarce as those are but those are the types of applications that you just fire and forget you don't get any acknowledgement of your application past the automatic ones made by the job site.

I've been blogging, keeping up my volunteer work it is good to keep some skills sharp. I have been working on my own project too which you can have a look at right here. I would like to widen the scope of the blog a bit but not sure how.

I feel like I can get back into the endless jobsearch grind but I will need a little break to gather myself. Things need to change as I can't keep doing this. There are some other things in the horizon some bigger projects than my volunteer work that I hope to update you on as soon as possible.

Sorry to have such a downer of a post on here I will try to make the next one be more positive.

Seetec - Update On The Struggle

So an update to endless problems with Seetec/Work Programme. Last time I was trying to get help with attending an interview in London for a promising administration job, £43 is a lot to magic out of the air when you only get £71 a week. Seetec however were being incredibly obstinate and were using a variety of reasons like the Enterprise oscillating their shield frequency in an attempt to deny me help and indeed a chance at a job.

Their main go to is Seetec don’t pay for jobs outside the local area (my local area is one of the most deprived in the UK). Now I remember my induction and initial interviews with Seetec when I forced onto this useless WPP with a history of bullying me and at no point did they say, “hey we know times are tough and competition for jobs is crazy but we only want you to look for jobs locally” because if that would have happened I would have called bullshit and raised holy hell. Like with a lot of things that Seetec say they tend to fall apart when they get examined.

Anyway the upside of the story is that they finally paid back my travel expenses today which you might say yay but after arguing back and forth about it for over a week during the preparation for a very competitive job. This is what Seetec do to people working their hardest to find a job they put obstacle after obstacle in front of them. I can only hope that continually to fight them and to raise issues at the level of my MP and soon with my local job centre might result in someone actually taking notice of this. That is my hope it is more likely though that I will just be denounced as just one of these ‘scroungers’ which the government has successfully fooled the majority of the public into believing outnumber the honest hard working job seekers slowly drowning in a sea of debt.