I was applying for a job today

[blanc]

Should I mention this? the 'jobseeker' whose experience of a day's insultingly demeaningly condescending getting back into work training I mentioned on another thread has a short temp. job helping a foreign embassy to contact firms to persuade them to relocate to their country. There are opportunities out there, you just have to look for them

[Stephen Morgan]

Story in the local paper, 1700 apply for 300 jobs at the ASDA.

[semper occultus]

the only short term & immediate solution to this is job-sharing - one week on / one week off so people can get a job down on their CV to break the no job : no experience cycle & get at least some increase in income....addressing the fact we have massive skill shortages & millions of economicaly inactive working-age people will take a bit longer - that hasn't happened over night

morgan... I'm seeing you as a teaching assistant...all those little pink shiny faces may pierce that carapace of cynicism of yours...

[blanc]

An alternative to job sharing might be to tax the rich and dismantle the stranglehold they have acquired on political life and start employing people to improve the quality of life for the majority - lets think, er... housing, build affordable houses, hospitals, build a few more of them, school class sizes and educational deprivation, reduce both by employing a few more people to teach, fried mars bar diets and obesity epidemics, create a better system of food distribution, landfill problem due to surplus consumption of crap made by wage-slaves abroad, oh work it out for yourself . There isn't no money, somebody's got it and they're not using it to pay for the things the rest of humanity needs.

[semper occultus]

An alternative to job sharing might be to tax the rich and dismantle the stranglehold they have acquired on political life....

how...& not likely in the next couple of months so not really an alternative...

[Stephen Morgan]

the only short term & immediate solution to this is job-sharing - one week on / one week off so people can get a job down on their CV to break the no job : no experience cycle & get at least some increase in income....addressing the fact we have massive skill shortages & millions of economicaly inactive working-age people will take a bit longer - that hasn't happened over night

There isn't such a thing as a massive skills shortage. Any idiot can work in ASDA. There is such a thing as a massive jobs shortage.

morgan... I'm seeing you as a teaching assistant...all those little pink shiny faces may pierce that carapace of cynicism of yours...

Funny you should say that, as soon as I became a student one of the girls I know said "[realname]'s going to be a history teacher". That seems to be the consensus, that I would make a good wearer of tweed jackets with leather elbow patches. Like this bloke. Not sure what a teaching assistant is. For the moment, though, I have no special marketable skills, being something of a jack of all trades. Also, ASDA seem to think I'm illiterate.

[semper occultus]

well the assistants are the low-rent wannabe teachers, with your ambition levels I wasn't setting my sights any higher but hey don't let me put you off from a PGCE ( & think of the amount of holidays they get ) :

Generally speaking, the GTTR accepts applications from mid-September to June for courses starting the following September or October.

heh..yeah my history teachers were always a bit...individualistic...mind you alot of primary schools are crying out for male teachers...

Skills crisis looming for West Midlands manufacturers
Sep 3 2010 by Anna Blackaby, Birmingham Post

The region’s thriving manufacturers are set to offer thousands of jobs in coming years – but this success story could come crashing down due to a lack of skills.

Over the next five years the West Midlands will see around 90,000 hard-to-fill manufacturing jobs as the UK’s buoyant industrial base turns out more products than in 1966 when employment in the sector was at its peak.

But despite the region having 221,000 people out of work, manufacturers are struggling to recruit because the local workforce does not have the skills needed to make these products.

Some firms even admit that an ageing workforce and a lack of fresh blood mean they will have to shut up shop in the next ten years and other companies have resorted to taking on 75-year-olds as they could not find suitably qualified younger people.

www.birminghampost.net

Ok - so the growth figures are looking a bit sick lately but...

BP says it cannot find skilled workers
By Louisa Peacock, Jobs Editor
7:30AM BST 14 Aug 2011

UK engineering skills shortages are threatening to hold back growth at oil giant BP, according to Trevor Garlick, head of the company's North Sea operations.

www.telegraph.co.uk

[Stephen Morgan]

well the assistants are the low-rent wannabe teachers, with your ambition levels I wasn't setting my sights any higher but hey don't let me put you off from a PGCE ( & think of the amount of holidays they get ) :

Ambition is against my religion. I couldn't assist someone. I have something of an aversion to having people in positions of power over me. All day every day? The whole entire day? No thanks. Same goes for being in a position of power over others. Kids don't count. I'd still have to graduate to get a PGCE, which is a while off yet. And, I believe, get at least a GCSE in both maths and English, neither of which I'd got.

[blanc]

I believe teaching assistants often assist by being the person who helps one or more children with special problems, due, for example, to medical conditions.

[blanc]

A bit more about teaching/assistant in case you had considered it StM. Some LAs offer short courses for teaching assistants. The govt websites on teaching now offer several routes. I don't know much about this as it was all PGTC when I did this, but there are bits of wording which suggest that 'demonstrate equivalence of' the missing gcse's can be accepted. It was pretty light on actual information as to what this entailed. Some teaching assistant jobs get advertised as part time, but the pay rate (in the London borough where I looked recently) was high enough that part time would put someone above JSA.

[Stephen Morgan]

Demonstrating an equivalent of a GCSE means having a foreign qualification or some other "equivalent" which I haven't got, in my experience.

[Joe Hillshoist]

I attended enough of these of these courses to realise I might just as well get a job..

So I did..

Poor me

Thats why they do it.

[Stephen Morgan]

I attended enough of these of these courses to realise I might just as well get a job..

So I did..

Poor me

Thats why they do it.

I don't think so. I've never known anyone get a job through one, or because of one, no matter how many hoops they get you to jump through.

[blanc]

I think the courses are there as a sop or political ploy to pretend that the govt cares about getting people back into work and will help them, at least if they'll only help themselves - the last part is where making the courses inconvenient, useless but compulsory comes in. Not turning up to a useless demeaning course is just cause to stop the very minimal 'benefit'. If there are 1700 applying for jobs in Asda, you can be sure the situation is not good. People don't fight for the right to work shelf filling for low pay if there are more attractive opportunities around. Interestingly, while teachers and others in the public sector are under constant pressure to prove outcomes, I don't hear anyone beefing about whether the course providers actually get people into jobs, or publicising info on what they cost. Workshare wouldn't work with the current wage structure, 6 people for every job means less than 8 hours work a week at minimum wage.

[semper occultus]

^^ I don't think the entire western economy is working with current wage structure !

To Fix the Economy, Raise Wages
www.huffingtonpost.com

Increase Wages to End the Crisis (Says the IMF!)
duncanseconomicblog.wordpress.com

constant screwing down of real wages has driven the debt bomb that created the crisis & now hindering the deleveraging process to get some semblance of recovery

summer's a crap time to look for a job anyway - recruitment won't be a priority when alot of manager's are on holiday & potential candidates might be aswell - will be loads of casual stuff at Xmas ofcourse :