Mortgage free in Forever Home :-)

WelshmansDaughter

It used to say somewhere how many views your diary had. Gave myself a fright with it one day.

PennysIntoPounds

You domestic goddess 💫

Such a shame job centres aren't, like, places people can go to for getting jobs. No disrespect at all to the people who work there who are just as understaffed and unsupported as all civil servants, but wouldn't it be nice if people who are struggling or vulnerable could go to a job centre and do something mad like get a job.
So much chat lately in the news and surveys about 'do you think people getting benefits should basically just have to die on the streets, your options are yes or probably'
Um, we could try making the basic system not completely ineffective and kafkaesque in every way, shape and form and then see how folk get on?

*gets off high horse*
*does my knee in* 
😏
Sorry for ranting on your diary KK!

KajiKita

PennysIntoPounds said:

You domestic goddess 💫

Such a shame job centres aren't, like, places people can go to for getting jobs. No disrespect at all to the people who work there who are just as understaffed and unsupported as all civil servants, but wouldn't it be nice if people who are struggling or vulnerable could go to a job centre and do something mad like get a job.
So much chat lately in the news and surveys about 'do you think people getting benefits should basically just have to die on the streets, your options are yes or probably'
Um, we could try making the basic system not completely ineffective and kafkaesque in every way, shape and form and then see how folk get on?

*gets off high horse*
*does my knee in* 
😏
Sorry for ranting on your diary KK!

Not intending to be political but… the suggestion that £240 million will do anything useful in this system to me seems laughable. I was advised when I first signed up that I could have an appointment with the careers advisor to write a CV etc. At that point the lead time for an appointment was six weeks …! I declined on the grounds that I was probably going to be okay and someone else would get more benefit from it. But the idea that someone could be left hanging if they really needed help, for six weeks before even starting with ‘how to get a job support’, was really worrying ….

KK

f0xh0les

I explained to DS1 yesterday that local jobs used to be written on postcards and displayed on tiny shelving units, and you picked some cards, went to the desk, and the Desk Bunny rang through and made interview appointments for the same/ following day for you to go to.  
He said that sounded better than the system now. They are not helping him find a job, they are checking he has applied for one. 
DH went to one of those compulsory CV things with his 8 page academic CV. They suggested he shouldn't have more than 2 pages. He laughed at them. It is now over 10 pages. 
They left him alone when he said was  Dr not  Mr.  

LadyWithAPlan

I think the lack of education about really important things like personal finance, job hunting, life skills, debt and saving really needs to be tackled. So many of us are here cos we either saw the light, or the light bulb hit us... but some more early prep on life skills including CVs would be invaluable to many.

ladybird1106

Lit the fire, early at 4.30pm (it was 15C here! 🥶) without it smoking at all in spite of a hefty downdraft - proper proud so Mr KK had a warm house to come home to after a day freezing his doo-daas off, working outside in the fog! 

This made me chuckle as OH is another one who regularly spends his days freezing his doo-daas off . He loves working outside. He once had a management post and when they decided he would be tied to his desk 4 days a week and just 1 day outside,  he became so depressed that we decided it would be best if he looked for another job. It meant a huge (to us) pay cut but he was so much happier. 

Love 🐞

Watty1

LadyWithAPlan said:

I think the lack of education about really important things like personal finance, job hunting, life skills, debt and saving really needs to be tackled. So many of us are here cos we either saw the light, or the light bulb hit us... but some more early prep on life skills including CVs would be invaluable to many.

Agree.  I did have CV coaching in my dim and distant past - but - basic skills on personal finance should be mandatory along with something Womens Aid run called the Freedom Programme - not all of it but a pared down version to show how healthy relationships develop and how toxic ones can too.  Having done two versions of that programme I wish I had the knowledge at a much much younger age.

KajiKita

@f0xh0les, DS1 is absolutely spot on. It’s about compliance with the rules, not sharing jobs or upskilling people. When I last signed on it used to be better - there was a portal that had local jobs on it. That seems to have died a decade ago - part of the austerity cuts? 🤷‍♀️ FWIW, make sure his CV is on CV Library and re-upload it at the beginning of every week - I just updated the month in the title back and forth between September and October. It genuinely makes a difference to where your CV comes in terms of being visible to recruiters when they are searching for candidates. I got a rush of, mostly useless 😉, calls at the beginning of every week after doing this. But it also meant I got calls about the real potential jobs that came across my awareness. 

Yes, I had the ‘your CV is too long, don’t need anything in there older than 10 years’ thing. I also laughed as some of my most demanding, technical, experience dates from 20 years ago. Also, I know from doing recruitment, that if I had a CV with an obvious stop at 10 years of history I would wonder what had been going on with them … a prison sentence perhaps?? 😳😉😂

@LadyWithAPlan, yes the life skills thing is huge. It used to be expected that parents would do this, but so many people, as parents, are deskilled in some key areas (e.g. cooking from scratch), not adapted to the more electronic world their children will be operating in, or just horribly time poor! Unfortunately, these kind of skills are not appreciated by education policy creators as they don’t drive employment skills, which seems to be the fundamental principle behind their approach. 

@ladybird1106, there is absolutely no chance that Mr KK would do a desk job either …. 😉😊

KK

WelshmansDaughter

Quietly grateful for my five years of home economics classes in secondary school.
At least I had the underlying practical understanding even if I haven’t always been able to use it/there were some ahem missing pieces.

KajiKita

WelshmansDaughter said:

Quietly grateful for my five years of home economics classes in secondary school.
At least I had the underlying practical understanding even if I haven’t always been able to use it/there were some ahem missing pieces.

Me too. Miss Counsell was ferocious but so organised in getting us to wash up as we went along, teaching us the basics of a roux sauce, making pastry and quiches, understanding the basics of nutrition and how to combine things to make a meal. I remember her demonstrating the use of the new piece of equipment to make a cake - a microwave oven! 

I learned a lot from watching my dad cook (very unusual for a man to be doing in the 1970s - he took a scientific approach to it), but he didn’t actively teach me in the same way that Miss Counsell did 😊

KK