The First Lesson

By Wednesday I was starting to wonder when the training would start. On Monday I had been evaluated, on Tuesday inducted. Today: Module D1.

Firstly, I hve to attend the jobcentrePLUS for the ritual signing-on. This consists of waiting for around 15 minutes in front of a row of desks. Mainly the desks are staffed by clerks who are doing their best to look busy. Occasionally one of them announces a surname, and everybody looks around the room to see who steps forward. Eventually they announce your surname, and you step forward, take a seat, and try to think of a suitable answer to the question "And how are things?"

As part of the contract to receive Jobseekers' Allowance (or to not receive it, in my case), you have to complete a form which outlines what you have done in the last fortnight to find a job. I used to be very conscientious about this aspect, making sure I had proof that I had contacted the requisite number of (potential) employers, noted every agency I had registered my details with. I would show the clerk what a good job I had done, waiting for some kind of recognition. In fact, I was criticised. I forget exactly for what - perhaps I had made too many phone calls and not written enough letters one week, or inappropriately included registrations with new recruitment consultants... Suffice to say, nowadays I don't make conversation with them. They ask me the formulaic question "Have you done any work paid or unpaid since your last signing-on?" They sign the form and I leave.

I now have 2 hours to kill before I am due at the YMCA. I go to the library. I go to the top of the multi-storey car park, and enjoy the view. I sit on a bench by the river, and eat my sandwiches. It's good to be out of the house.

There are a lot of people at the YMCA today. The small woman and the big man are there from yesterday, together with several people who all seem to know each other, and who turn out to be builders. There's a little man with a grey beard - he's reading the paper quietly, and a few others in various corners. Following the inevitable twenty minute wait, we are summoned to a table near a flip chart.

Around the table we are asked to introduce ourselves, giving our names and our preferred occupation. There are the builders. One of them announces that if he can't be a builder, he would settle for being an astronaut. This causes great hilarity around the table. He enjoys the laughter briefly, before becoming more serious, adding "Or World Superbike Champion." I wonder if he would be happy in any job which involved the wearing of a helmet. There's an electrician, a gardener, someone who wants to work in education, and my friend the big man wants to be a dustman. The tutors attempt a joke about how refreshing it is that he doesn't want to be 'a waste disposal operative', or a 'recycling technician'. As usual, they draw a complete blank.

The flipchart is turned over, and the tutor writes the word 'JOB LEADS', then draws a circle around it. Here we go - it's Pauline's Pens in full effect!

"What is a Job Lead?", we are asked. Naturally, nobody is confident enough they know, and so no-one speaks. "Ok then - " and she writes on the flipchart the word 'Telephone', and joins it to the circle with a line. "And another one?" She writes the word 'Flexible New Deal', and joins that up as well. No wonder no-one knew the answer.

We are split into groups to brainstorm as many words as we can. We come up with 18, including letters, local papers, cards in newsagents windows, the phone numbers on the sides of vans, the Yellow Pages, trade and specialist magazines, friends and relations, ex-colleagues, the internet... really, nothing is too obvious to mention. We spend half an hour comparing notes, the tutors transcribing our contributions onto the flipchart. Of course, we haven't got all of them, so they delightedly tell us the two we have missed.

By way of a digression, the difference is pointed out to us between Employment Agencies and Recruitment Agencies. I hadn't realised there was a difference, but apparently the former have a bad reputation amongst my fellow jobseekers. They offer only sporadic, unreliable hours, and don't always pay on time.

And in the words of Henry Blofeld, "That's tea."

I get talking to a man who has arrived late. I've heard some of his contributions, and he sounds pretty smart. He turns out to be a former sales director of a multi-national computer hardware company. Like me, he was made redundant a year ago. I ask him if he considers that this training will do him any good at all. I receive the answer I was expecting. Like me he realises that the programme, far from being the bespoke made-to-measure service promised at the jobcentrePLUS, was designed for a world in which if someone remains unemployed for more than 6 months, it is essentially their fault. The training seems, so far, to be attempting to rectify problems which I just don't have. When I ask why he's here, he answers that it's because they would stop his benefits otherwise.

After the break, there is a quiz. How much does a quarter page advert in the Local Gazette cost? What percentage of all jobs get advertised in the jobcentrePLUS? What percentage of all jobs are obtained from a speculative approach? What percentage of all jobs are never advertised at all?

If you answered £2000, 5%, 25% and 70%, have a house point. The object of course, is to show that if your jobseeking is confined only to the papers, or the computers in the jobcentrePLUS, you are effectively wasting your time.

So, the message is that you should use as many different sources as possible for your job leads, and then you should follow them up. Great.

Once again, I queue for my petrol money, and leave quietly.