This was the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused my girlfriend to leave the country. She’s got a Masters in Economics and a PhD in Economic Geography. She can also program in Visual Basic, and has a GIS qualification. She was in between academic posts and therefore had to sign on. They sent her on a three hour course that told her there’s this thing called the “Internet” which you access using a “computer” where you can do a thing called “search” which will help you find “jobs”. That was enough for her.
(I remember there being a two-tier dole in the past with a separate stream for people with an education, but I’m guessing that’s gone now. It isn’t exactly egalitarian or pluralistic, but c’mon.)
I got off light, a couple of friends of mine were sent on the course I mentioned at the local college, which is three long days of sitting around doing nothing. One of those two had to not go to work (one can work up to sixteen hours and collect a reduced amount of benefit, and remain eligible for housing benefit, free prescriptions and so on) because work clashed with the compulsory course. (You still have to try to get work that will allow you to not sign on, if working and signing on at the same time, hence the compulsion.)
I know a SysAdmin with MS qualifications out the yingyang and they were sent on a similar thing over here. It’s all a bag of bollocks just so they can claim that they are getting people off the live register and into training. They couldn’t give one fuck who actually is going on the courses once the numbers are massaged.
Last year I had an acquaintance stop at my place of business and ask if he could apply for a job. I explained that I wasn’t hiring and had no real plans to hire in the near future. He said that was awesome, and wanted to apply.
Having never been unemployed, I didn’t understand that he had to put in a certain number of applications each (week/day?) in order to continue collecting money. He specifically did not want a job, but wanted to collect the max he was entitled to. If I had a job to offer he would have turned down the application.
I told him to go away; he was pissed off.:rolleyes:
I once was on one of these lovely helpful job centre courses too, I tried to take advantage of the ‘free training’, to go on a college course, only to find out that yes they would allow me to go, but I’d have to miss 2 days a week of the actual classes to do ‘job search’, this in a town with virtually no jobs (really, I found 2 to apply for in 2 years, neither with job centre help), and then would have to attend for 3 days a week, in an otherwise empty classroom, during the holidays, otherwise I’d be classed as absent and booted off the course.
They also ‘corrected’ CVs with appalling grammar and spelling.
Incidently, the B & Q phone application used to apparently have a question which asked for the appropriate response to a customer getting angry about an unstocked item in the tools section, giving options of (something along the lines of)
a) Keep calm, apologise for the lack of stock,
b) Offer to search the warehouse then don’t return,
c) Find a supervisor and ask them to deal with it,
d) Attack them with an axe.