So this week has been crazy busy! Yesterday I had to go into Training Link early due to some students needing extra supervision. I had extra paperwork to prepare for the Jobsworth Centre and well, had household chores too, not that I got very far with those. Today was Jobsworth Centre and more Training Link this afternoon, tomorrow and Thursday I have yet more Training Link stuff since PCs need repairing/rebuilding. Finally, at some point in amongst all this, I need to get a blood test done.
Over the weekend, I got an email from a training group called Skills Team. They work out of West London College and run courses for unemployed people &c. We first met when I was on the Work Programme with Reed and they were running a basic IT course. Between them and myself we realised the course wasn’t suitable for me, and parted ways. This course however, looked a lot more useful – at least as far as CV padding is concerned. It’s an ILM¹ accredited programme in Leadership and Team Leading Skills. It’s free, lasts 10 days and is local. Very good, I thought, and printed it out to discuss with my JCP² advisor. After all, I’d not heard of ILM ’til now so a second opinion would be good before I waste my time.
So I went in today, signed on and waited around to see my advisor, who looked it over and flat out told me that no, I would not be allowed to do it. It would, they agreed, increase my chances of finding a job – at least as much as anything else I am doing – and would look good on my CV, but… and this is important, because they hadn’t specifically referred me to the course (and it appears to be a full time 2-week course), even though it’s one of the training partners they use, then it wouldn’t be counted as job-search related.
I must admit to a certain amount of surprise here (not an awful lot of course, this is JCP we’re talking about), since I had kind of assumed they’d want to get me working again. Obviously, I was wrong.
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¹ Institute of Leadership & Management
² Jobsworth Centre Plus
2 Comments on Because we want to get you back in work…
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Maybe complain about it to your MP?
I really should, though I doubt it’d do much good. This is policy and has been for a long time. They don’t like you doing full time training because it’s not “actively looking for work”. Which would be fine if there was work to look for.