SEARCHING FOR A JOB

In the previous entry I described how despite not having a job I was almost financially comfortable. However being out of work could be very boring especially during the midweek. I knew sooner or later the benefits office would be on my back and most of all the longer I spent out of work the worse it would look to a future employer.

So after 3 - 4 months I started making at least half an effort to find a job mostly in local newspaper and the job center. I quickly discovered you put every job vacancy in to one of the three following categories.

1) HIGH END JOBS. Management/executive type positions.......obviously I couldn’t do being only 19 years of age.

2) LOW END JOBS. Low wages/long hours/unsocial hours/boring repetitive jobs/companies with bad reputations or a combination of several of these.................I had spent 7 years in secondary school constantly being told that doing well would improve my job prospects. Since I had A-Levels I genuinely believed at the time that I was too good to consider applying for jobs like this.

3) ANY JOB IN BETWEEN THE ABOVE TWO CATEGORIES

This is where I initially set my sights to find work but quickly ran into problems. Many of these jobs required “previous experience” which made you wonder how you actually acquired the experience in the first place. Driving jobs were instantly out because I never wanted to drive anyway.

What I was surprised by was the lack of jobs asking for specific academic qualifications. The closest any of them came was a statement such as “must have good numeracy skills”. In most cases they require an applicant to sit a test. I myself had to do a basic maths test prior to doing work experience at the Yorkshire bank despite having already shown them I had an A-Level in Maths. This shows that most employers don’t pay much attention to grades from school.

Likewise A-Level computing wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, at the time of writing this nearly 18 years later I have yet to see a single job that requires A-Level computing or any of the obscure things we learned on that course.

As stated at great length elsewhere I hated school, but it was only after I left it became obvious that vast amounts of what I did were a total waste of time, even the subjects I specifically chosen because I believed they would be useful. At G.C.S.E level age 14-16 the teachers made it sound as if our entire lives were going to be defined by the grades that we got.

Who in the real world honestly cares what grades I got for the likes of Media studies, English Literature and Integrated humanities? Those three subjects alone account for around a quarter of the time spent in a classroom from 14-16. It was obvious I was going to have to set my sights a bit lower.

I looked at several options this time, the first was getting a fork lift truck licence. I put my name down for a course offered by the benefits office but was in agency work anyway by the time it started. The second was to do a course at College which I started later that summer every Monday evening (see later entry). The third was to sign up for employment agencies and gain some work experience via temporary work.

This looked like the best way to go, I would gain some work experience, while at a company I would have a better chance of being taken on full time, if it didn’t work out I could always sign back on for unemployment benefit again. I would keep the benefits office off my back as it would be obvious I was trying to get work, it would look better to a future employer and most of all it was extra money in the bank.

It didn’t quite work out like this but thats the way it went for the next year..............................