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Tories and unemployment benefits
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Merrick
Merrick
2148 posts

another dodgy training course anecdote
Aug 21, 2008, 14:41
shanshee_allures wrote:
Infact New Deal also included some of the goofy, soul mushing training schemes you speak of.


In my time on JSA I was sent on an 'expand your jobsearch' thing. You answer lots of questions, ('can you handle irregular hours?', 'do you like working with children?', etc) and rate them on a 1 to 5. It told me I wanted to be a dispensing optician.

The woman at the dole asked me how it had gone, and when I told her she said it had baffled her too, saying she wanted to be an air traffic controller. The training company were laughing all the way to the bank.

I was then sent to get NVQ Level 2 in Information Technology. (Level 1 is where they teach you to turn a computer on, open a Word file, close it down, don't spill coffee on the computer; Level 2 is the same but doing something in the Word file). They gave us three months to learn how to do this.

They gave us a load of guff about how this was a 'nationally recognised qualification'. Yeah, recognised as being a shitty waste of paper. Then the trainers were teaching people on Lotus cos it's cheaper than having Word.

The training with this and all the other courses is outsourced. It is not geared to training people, but to doing the minimum they have to in order to get the wads of money off the government.

Personally, I was happy to sit there getting on with writing things I would've been doing at home any way. But there were people there who genuinely wanted to learn how to use IT and they were being cruelly cheated.

In the end I never got my certificate. The government decided to have a crackdown on youth unemployment, which meant the training companies got more money for handling under-25s, so us older folks were just turfed out before we'd done the exam.

Again, personally I didn't care cos it didn't hurt me, but I really felt for the older people who'd already felt like they'd been scrapheaped before they started the course.

None of them would've been made any better by the Conservatives Wisconsin plan that would've shoved them into any McJob or made them scrub graffiti.
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