Training options
Skills in poor health
Towards the end of 2007, the government announced plans for a skills health check for unemployed people. Now, if they hadn't messed me around so much with New Deal and other counter-productive policies, my CV would show many more relevant skills than it actually does. In any case, it may have been empty rhetoric as subsequent years came and went and I am still waiting to hear anything more about that skills health check.
Never giving up on IT
While I am unemployed, I continue building my blogs practising HTML and CSS as I go, so that I eventually reach a point where I can expand my knowledge of web design further. On a technical level, this particular blog has little extra to add to what I've done elsewhere, but it is important for different reasons. I know that Amazon, Blogger and Facebook offer plenty of advanced features for programmers and web designers, so I can learn quite a lot as I go along if I keep at it. Nevertheless, if I have to learn this way it will be a slow process and probably too late to make any difference to my job prospects, but by doing all this stuff it occupies my mind and I learn all sorts of other things along the way. Most importantly, I don't forget what I've already learned. Furthermore, whenever I expand my knowledge, I update Blog setup. I'm definitely not giving up on the idea of working again as a programmer, remote as the prospect seems, even as I look at alternative careers.
"New Deal" gets in the way
Because New Deal placements occupy a full working week (including the half-day job search sessions), there is no time to do anything else. I can't do college training courses in any educational year in which I'm due to do New Deal and still do them justice. While it is true that time spent on courses can be deducted from the placement, that's not enough to do the course properly. In any case, the operation at the former farm near Ragdale offered no flexibility for things like that, since people are picked up and dropped off in Leicester at the start and end of each working day. So while I was working there, I wouldn't have been able to leave a couple of hours early unless somebody else was allowed to leave early to transport me.
If I'm going to get any value out of a training course, I need to be able to focus on it. Merely turning up at the college once or twice a week, then forgetting about it until the next lesson, isn't going to do me any good. But that's what would happen if I tried to combine training with New Deal. As I'm more likely to get a job if I get suitable training than if I get an unsuitable placement, it's easy to understand why I resent New Deal. I wouldn't object to placements if I could see that they were useful. If I could learn something that would encourage an employer (not necessarily the one that I was actually on a placement for) to at least consider me for a job that they otherwise wouldn't, a placement would be useful as an alternative or follow-up to a training course. Shredding paper and badly assembling furniture won't impress anybody.
The replacement of New Deal by Flexible New Deal didn't of itself change anything, nor will the new Work Programme. As I don't know when I'll be put on that scheme, I can't commit myself to anything much. When I know my fate, I fear that I could be on a placement that carries me through to March 2013. But at the moment, I am in limbo.
College courses
My training options are limited because the best college courses generally start in the autumn. I don't like the idea of doing more than one course at a time (and like it even less after my previous experience) although I might consider it. The rules about training for unemployed people forbid intensive courses (though discretionary exceptions can be made, it's clear that one isn't supposed to ask about them), so such people end up doing courses over many weeks (maybe several months) with two to four hours per week, rather than doing the whole thing within a solid month or less (another silly rule). With all these rules, it normally limits me to one college course per year. I can't sensibly combine them with New Deal so that cuts them down to one college course every two years, which is hardly enough to rebuild my CV.
Leicester adult skills and learning services
Leicester adult skills and learning services operates a lot of college courses, but seems mainly interested in basic skills. They offer CLAIT and ECDL courses, but the reality is that what I don't know I can teach myself as and when the need arises, or when it suits me. Because I know so much of the stuff already, I feel that I'd be wasting my time. However, it's likely that I'll end up doing one or both of these for the sake of showing that I am doing some re-training. Let's hope my next ECDL experience, if there is to be one, is better than my last.
Leicester College
Leicester College has changed a lot since I did my web design course. For computer programmers and would-be computer programmers, there are full-time BTEC courses that are spread over two years. Obviously, I could not commit myself to full-time courses because they'd be against the rules for claiming benefits. In any case, a two-year course would take me beyond my sixty-first birthday. Apart from those, the choices are much the same as those offered by Leicester adult skills and learning services.
Other colleges
There are other local colleges such as WEA, but even if I could find something that I could do, I doubt that it will affect my job prospects. I'm no longer looking at college courses as a serious option, except to satisfy the needs of the people I have to deal with. Obviously, if I am ordered to go on a course, I have to go, but as we've seen, such orders don't necessarily lead to successful outcomes.
A college's comments
I received an interesting comment from a college tutor, who offered these thoughts by e-mail after reading this blog.
I am a tutor at a college where we "offer" re-training for people. To receive funding, the candidates have to
a) be recommended to us by the Job Centre
b) be over 19 years of age
c) have been unemployed between 6 and 12 months.
Despite unemployment being as it is – we have received no candidates at all – (we’ve been "running" for 4 weeks now). There are far too many rivers to cross for people to qualify. I agree with everything you say. Here we are, willing to help people get back to work; there they are – the people who WANT to retrain and get back to work – and then ……. You have to fit in with the criteria. Very few people hit those marks exactly and the ones that do have already signed up for courses.
Open University
In August 2008, somebody suggested that I try the Open University. I haven't looked in detail but I see that the courses are timetabled. It means that while I could learn as and when I pleased up to a point, I'd have to reach targets at particular points in time, before moving on to the next stage. I get the impression that if I finish way ahead of schedule, I still won't be able to go to the next stage until the appropriate time. As such, New Deal would still be a problem, because during that period, I really wouldn't be able to do much studying if the New Deal project were unsuitable for me. I think the idea of an Open University course, or indeed a BTEC course, is something to consider after I'm pensioned off. At this stage, it's too late for me to consider it as a way back to work. Any training I do now would need to yield quick results.
Home training
Apart from my earlier bad experience, I lost my home internet connection in November 2004 and didn't restore it until March 2008 so my home for such purposes during the interim would have been Leicester public library. I really didn't want to use that for formal training, not least because what I did there was partly a training exercise anyway. Since I restored my home internet connection, I looked again at home training options including Learndirect, which offers affordable government subsidised courses. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, very few of them are actually relevant to my needs. ECDL courses are available, but not a lot else. There are no programming courses and the only web design course is for FrontPage, which isn't really much use to me. Although there are home study courses available from other suppliers, many of these courses are beyond the price range of an unemployed person, especially if a government subsidy isn't available.
Teach myself
I'll eventually buy a future version of MS Office and teach myself. It won't get me a certificate but it's too late to worry about that now. For programming, Visual Studio is a possibility but it's beyond my price range just now. I can get into it after I'm pensioned off, so it's irrelevant to the search for a job. Meanwhile, I'm still practising HTML and CSS. As I showed in my ability to learn the basics of EXCEL spreadsheets quickly, I can teach myself about computer software very quickly if I want to.
March 2013
Once I'm pensioned off, I'll be in a more relaxed state of mind, therefore learning will be easier. I'll also have more money, so if something really takes my fancy such as MS Office or Visual Studio, I can save up for it. I'll also be confident in the knowledge that nobody will threaten to stop my benefits, as they sometimes do now. I can't imagine that I'll be able to get a job at that age if I haven't got one before then, so it remains to be seen whether I buy training courses or not. If I'm not bothered about Certificates, I may just buy teach-yourself books and learn from them. Alternatively or additionally, I may consider trying to go on one of the full-time BTEC college courses or an Open University course. Still, it's a sad indictment on the British system that I can only think about the kind of training that I'd like after I'm pensioned off.
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