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.

—–

¹ Institute of Leadership & Management

² Jobsworth Centre Plus

2 Comments on Because we want to get you back in work…

    • 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.

Comments are closed.