My experience as an unemployed graduate...
Just over a year ago, after completing my degree
but unemployed, I realised I would have to sign up for Job Seeker’s
Allowance (JSA). I was lucky enough to be able to move back and live with my
parents after university, but money for my phone, transport and so on was
something I had to find myself, and that is perfectly understandable. Obviously,
I wanted to start my own life, however, eight weeks into being a graduate, I
still hadn’t found any form of work and my overdraft was expended, I had sold
everything I no longer felt I needed (including a lot of my camera equipment)
and I had run out of money.
So, with the dawning realisation that finding a job (any job, let alone
a graduate job) was going to be harder than I had naively hoped, I cycled the 5
miles to my nearest job centre and asked to sign on. They sent me straight back
home to do it online, as that’s how it is done now. This was early October
2012. Finally, in November, I was invited to a meeting at the Job centre. I sat
with an advisor and went into more detail about myself, handed over a CV and
was assigned a permanent advisor who I was required to visit once a week (I was
offered the chance of choosing my day and time so I picked Friday at 8:30am,
the first slot of the day (when the centre is quietest)). For privacy reasons,
I’ll name my advisor ‘Clare’.
The sickly green of the Job Centre sign. Image courtesy of the Guardian.
My first meeting went well; we set up my job search preferences on the
system (journalism, photography, media) and discussed my background. Needless
to say, the Job Centre isn’t really geared towards graduates and I knew my job
preferences wouldn’t show up many results. There seems to be an attitude that
graduates walk into work straight from university and that Mummy and Daddy will
pay for them if they don’t. This is partly true (as mentioned with my
accommodation situation) but my family is nowhere near wealthy enough to simply
fund my unemployment, particularly when unpaid internships and grad-schemes are
becoming more and more commonplace, and with two siblings at university too.
Hence my signing-on.
This lack of understanding of graduates revealed itself in all its glory
in my second week on JSA. Part of the ‘deal’ of receiving JSA is that one is
expected to comply with certain rules and conditions (applying to a minimum of
three jobs each week, attending all of your appointments, demonstrating a
commitment to finding work, being available for work…all things the majority of
job seekers do without the condescending attitude from the Job Centre). You are
also expected to attend training workshops to ‘help’ you. My experience of
these ‘workshops’ is as follows:
I was told to attend a two hour session on ‘finding work’ one Thursday
afternoon. I thought this may include interview tips, cv writing skills,
covering letter writing and so on. These were things I had had access to at
university so I was little irritated at having to go through more, especially
as I didn’t expect it to be as high-quality, but there may have been benefits
to it. And when you’re unemployed, filling two hours of your day with something
vaguely productive is always a good thing. I cycled to the job-centre
(something I was already becoming familiar with doing; a true Norman Tebbit cliche) and sat down with five
others (we were grouped by age). The advisor doing the ‘course’ was actually a
person who had gone into the Job Centre after losing his job behind a bar and
they’d given him a job in the centre itself. Not exactly a professional in the
field of employment, then. His main piece of wisdom from the 40 minutes we were
there (what happened to the two hours?) was that “looking online” is a good
thing to try and that “having a cv is very important”. These are genuine things
I was told. Needless to say, I felt I had just wasted a lot of time that could
have been spent filling in applications (at this point I was averaging three
applications a week). The only useful thing was the list of job
websites I was given. But even then, I had already signed up to five or six by
that point.
I made my feelings about this workshop clear to Clare, but she simply
said that I had to go to these sessions because that was part of the
‘contract’. At this point, I should mention that my JSA was contribution based;
essentially, I was being paid an amount which reflected the tax I had paid
during the previous five years of work I had been doing, first as a full time
sales assistant in a shop and then as a contracted photographer at my
university during my student years. To this end, I had effectively paid my JSA
through my own taxes and was not claiming from others’ taxes. This is the same
for the majority of claimants.
As December rolled along I widened my search. I had initially been
looking for graduate work in the field I was interested in, as most people
would do. Sadly, the things I am vaguely skilled at and have knowledge of are
arts-based. And the arts industry is essentially in a freelance free-fall to
wageless oblivion. So, swallowing my pride and desires to work in a graduate
job I wanted, I began looking for other jobs too. I was now applying to an
average of ten jobs per week, ranging from bar work, nightclub photography,
shelf stacking, graduate schemes, internships, medical photography, shop work,
voluntary positions and so on. I was even applying to jobs I was unsure I could
get to or afford to travel to/move location for (jobs in Derby, Leek, Stafford,
London, Bristol, Wales, Scotland, Hungary, Viet Nam etc). I was mainly
receiving the infuriating “due to the volume of applicants we cannot provide
feedback” rejection emails, if I received a reply at all. The Job Centre
provided no help. Clare had kindly allowed me to visit once a fortnight, as I
was meeting all of their requirements, but during these 20 minute Friday
morning meetings, I merely showed her my job search records, signed the forms
to get the JSA and sighed a lot about the fact I was still unemployed despite
having a degree and a lot of extra-curricular skills and experience on top of
it.
I had started a short course to add shorthand to my abilities, as this
appeared to be something required of those hoping to go into media (in
particular, it was a requirement for one graduate scheme I was applying to).
For six hours a week I was learning how to write squiggly lines, and the rest
was spent applying to jobs and boosting my photographic portfolio. Christmas
came and went. I had now passed 200 applications to jobs as varied as fork-lift
truck driver and a medical photographer in a dentist’s practice. Still nothing.
I was struggling to find voluntary things to do (Birmingham has the youngest
population in Europe, and also had some of the highest unemployment in the UK
at the time) and I had even been in the infuriating position of being told I
was over-skilled for some shop work I had applied to, despite having extensive
retail experience. In hind-sight, I could have dumbed down my CV more for these
non-graduate jobs, but after three years of university I think I felt that my
degree qualification should be something I should be proud of and highlight. It
cost me the best of the £30,000!
Of the 250 or so applications I had done by the end of January 2013,
Clare had probably been responsible for 12 of them. The Job Centre had
effectively been little more than an (ugly and unwelcoming) administrative
building I went to, to receive money. In the first week of February, something
happened which shocked me. By now, the job centre had moved to an online
portal, through which job seekers have to keep a record of all of their search
activity, upload a cv and demonstrate how they are looking for work. This is a
reasonable expectation, despite it infringing somewhat on privacy, as the
Department for Work and Pensions demands access to everything on there. This
means the advisor also has access and can recommend a job to you. When they say
‘recommend’ they actually mean “APPLY TO THIS JOB NOW!”
Clare had picked a job as an optical technician or something. It was a
job in an optician’s, responsible for their image archive. It sounded quite
interesting and I would have applied even if it hadn’t been mandatory. I left
the job centre and went home (I’d usually be home by 10am, so had the whole day
to do applications and my shorthand course). I applied to seven jobs
that day. However, Clare’s link on the job search system didn’t work. This
wasn’t the first, second or even 10th time this had happened
and I was used to it. I looked up the company who had posted the job and went
to their site, but the job was no longer listed. Thinking nothing of it other
than mild disappointment, I assumed my seven other job applications that day
(let alone the seven or so I had done earlier in the week) would more than meet
the minimum of three I had to apply to.
A week later, Clare saw that I hadn’t applied to the job she had
selected. I explained what had happened and about the 14 other applications I
had done that week, which she could see online too, but she said she would
“have” to sanction me. A sanction is a thirteen week suspension of your JSA.
For me, this was frustrating. But for someone who depended on that money to pay
bills, or rent, or to eat? How is that possibly going to help them find work?
What’s more, it was the dreadful website system that had caused this problem in
the first place. It wasn’t my fault they had listed a job that no longer
existed. And now I had lost my only source of income despite having applied to
over 250 jobs in three months. (During this week I had also been rejected from
a £17,000 a year job working for Eurostar as a part-time copy-writer, because I
was ‘overly skilled for the position’. That phrase is the one which always left me feeling utterly hopeless and lost. How can you ever be over-skilled for
something? Surely that’s just a benefit?).
Annoyed about the lack of common sense, discretion, and the injustice I
felt I had received due to incompetence elsewhere, I appealed the decision.
Almost absurdly, whilst the appeal is on-going you still have to attend the job
centre every week and continue to meet all the requirements they place on you,
even though you are no longer getting anything from them in return expect a
smug superiority and the feeling of being the base of society. My first appeal
was rejected by the middle of March. I later found out that the people who
judged my appeal were the same people who enforced the sanction…because that’s
a fair system. From my viewpoint, it appeared no logic or thinking had gone
into the decision; the circumstances and my records had clearly not been looked
at. So I appealed again.
Luckily, by the middle of March 2013, some former colleagues had
recommended me for a job and I had been offered a part-time position in a shop.
The sanctions no longer mattered and I gladly signed off, hopefully to never,
ever go through this situation again. My second appeal was still pending and I
heard nothing about it once I singed off.
In April, I was offered an interview for a graduate position in London (my 286th job application).
Ten days later I was offered the job and moved down to the South East in May,
as I had always suspected I would end up having to do. My quest to find a
graduate position had finally ended, and I was even working in something
vaguely close to my original hopes and getting paid far more than I had ever
hoped. A far cry from the dark days of December when I had lost all self-esteem
and belief in myself and for the first time since being a young child, had at
one point broken down in tears because of the hopelessness. JSA gladly faded
from memory until one day in July, a whole six months after I was first
sanctioned, I received a random payment into my bank account. No letter, phone
call or email, just a payment that matched the exact amount I had not been paid
whilst sanctioned. I had to phone up to clarify.
I was lucky JSA was merely there to help me afford travel, a phone and
to slowly clear my credit card and overdraft debts. Had I depended on that to
survive, I don’t know what I would have done. I was wrongly, unfairly and
pointlessly sanctioned by an over-zealous and incompetent service which does
not help those it is supposed to. It demoralises, demonises and ridicules those
that use its service, making them jump through higher and higher hoops and
punishing them for petty and minor things. And I had been lucky enough to avoid
the work-fare scheme!
I doubt I am the only person to experience this, and if you haven’t, I
sincerely hope you never have to.
Note: I kept a record of all of my job applications as part of my requirements to receive JSA and for personal records. I still have this file as testament to the amount of applications I sent.
My experience as an unemployed graduate...
Just over a year ago, after completing my degree
but unemployed, I realised I would have to sign up for Job Seeker’s
Allowance (JSA). I was lucky enough to be able to move back and live with my
parents after university, but money for my phone, transport and so on was
something I had to find myself, and that is perfectly understandable. Obviously,
I wanted to start my own life, however, eight weeks into being a graduate, I
still hadn’t found any form of work and my overdraft was expended, I had sold
everything I no longer felt I needed (including a lot of my camera equipment)
and I had run out of money.
So, with the dawning realisation that finding a job (any job, let alone
a graduate job) was going to be harder than I had naively hoped, I cycled the 5
miles to my nearest job centre and asked to sign on. They sent me straight back
home to do it online, as that’s how it is done now. This was early October
2012. Finally, in November, I was invited to a meeting at the Job centre. I sat
with an advisor and went into more detail about myself, handed over a CV and
was assigned a permanent advisor who I was required to visit once a week (I was
offered the chance of choosing my day and time so I picked Friday at 8:30am,
the first slot of the day (when the centre is quietest)). For privacy reasons,
I’ll name my advisor ‘Clare’.
|
| The sickly green of the Job Centre sign. Image courtesy of the Guardian. |
My first meeting went well; we set up my job search preferences on the
system (journalism, photography, media) and discussed my background. Needless
to say, the Job Centre isn’t really geared towards graduates and I knew my job
preferences wouldn’t show up many results. There seems to be an attitude that
graduates walk into work straight from university and that Mummy and Daddy will
pay for them if they don’t. This is partly true (as mentioned with my
accommodation situation) but my family is nowhere near wealthy enough to simply
fund my unemployment, particularly when unpaid internships and grad-schemes are
becoming more and more commonplace, and with two siblings at university too.
Hence my signing-on.
This lack of understanding of graduates revealed itself in all its glory
in my second week on JSA. Part of the ‘deal’ of receiving JSA is that one is
expected to comply with certain rules and conditions (applying to a minimum of
three jobs each week, attending all of your appointments, demonstrating a
commitment to finding work, being available for work…all things the majority of
job seekers do without the condescending attitude from the Job Centre). You are
also expected to attend training workshops to ‘help’ you. My experience of
these ‘workshops’ is as follows:
I was told to attend a two hour session on ‘finding work’ one Thursday
afternoon. I thought this may include interview tips, cv writing skills,
covering letter writing and so on. These were things I had had access to at
university so I was little irritated at having to go through more, especially
as I didn’t expect it to be as high-quality, but there may have been benefits
to it. And when you’re unemployed, filling two hours of your day with something
vaguely productive is always a good thing. I cycled to the job-centre
(something I was already becoming familiar with doing; a true Norman Tebbit cliche) and sat down with five
others (we were grouped by age). The advisor doing the ‘course’ was actually a
person who had gone into the Job Centre after losing his job behind a bar and
they’d given him a job in the centre itself. Not exactly a professional in the
field of employment, then. His main piece of wisdom from the 40 minutes we were
there (what happened to the two hours?) was that “looking online” is a good
thing to try and that “having a cv is very important”. These are genuine things
I was told. Needless to say, I felt I had just wasted a lot of time that could
have been spent filling in applications (at this point I was averaging three
applications a week). The only useful thing was the list of job
websites I was given. But even then, I had already signed up to five or six by
that point.
I made my feelings about this workshop clear to Clare, but she simply
said that I had to go to these sessions because that was part of the
‘contract’. At this point, I should mention that my JSA was contribution based;
essentially, I was being paid an amount which reflected the tax I had paid
during the previous five years of work I had been doing, first as a full time
sales assistant in a shop and then as a contracted photographer at my
university during my student years. To this end, I had effectively paid my JSA
through my own taxes and was not claiming from others’ taxes. This is the same
for the majority of claimants.
As December rolled along I widened my search. I had initially been
looking for graduate work in the field I was interested in, as most people
would do. Sadly, the things I am vaguely skilled at and have knowledge of are
arts-based. And the arts industry is essentially in a freelance free-fall to
wageless oblivion. So, swallowing my pride and desires to work in a graduate
job I wanted, I began looking for other jobs too. I was now applying to an
average of ten jobs per week, ranging from bar work, nightclub photography,
shelf stacking, graduate schemes, internships, medical photography, shop work,
voluntary positions and so on. I was even applying to jobs I was unsure I could
get to or afford to travel to/move location for (jobs in Derby, Leek, Stafford,
London, Bristol, Wales, Scotland, Hungary, Viet Nam etc). I was mainly
receiving the infuriating “due to the volume of applicants we cannot provide
feedback” rejection emails, if I received a reply at all. The Job Centre
provided no help. Clare had kindly allowed me to visit once a fortnight, as I
was meeting all of their requirements, but during these 20 minute Friday
morning meetings, I merely showed her my job search records, signed the forms
to get the JSA and sighed a lot about the fact I was still unemployed despite
having a degree and a lot of extra-curricular skills and experience on top of
it.
I had started a short course to add shorthand to my abilities, as this
appeared to be something required of those hoping to go into media (in
particular, it was a requirement for one graduate scheme I was applying to).
For six hours a week I was learning how to write squiggly lines, and the rest
was spent applying to jobs and boosting my photographic portfolio. Christmas
came and went. I had now passed 200 applications to jobs as varied as fork-lift
truck driver and a medical photographer in a dentist’s practice. Still nothing.
I was struggling to find voluntary things to do (Birmingham has the youngest
population in Europe, and also had some of the highest unemployment in the UK
at the time) and I had even been in the infuriating position of being told I
was over-skilled for some shop work I had applied to, despite having extensive
retail experience. In hind-sight, I could have dumbed down my CV more for these
non-graduate jobs, but after three years of university I think I felt that my
degree qualification should be something I should be proud of and highlight. It
cost me the best of the £30,000!
Of the 250 or so applications I had done by the end of January 2013,
Clare had probably been responsible for 12 of them. The Job Centre had
effectively been little more than an (ugly and unwelcoming) administrative
building I went to, to receive money. In the first week of February, something
happened which shocked me. By now, the job centre had moved to an online
portal, through which job seekers have to keep a record of all of their search
activity, upload a cv and demonstrate how they are looking for work. This is a
reasonable expectation, despite it infringing somewhat on privacy, as the
Department for Work and Pensions demands access to everything on there. This
means the advisor also has access and can recommend a job to you. When they say
‘recommend’ they actually mean “APPLY TO THIS JOB NOW!”
Clare had picked a job as an optical technician or something. It was a
job in an optician’s, responsible for their image archive. It sounded quite
interesting and I would have applied even if it hadn’t been mandatory. I left
the job centre and went home (I’d usually be home by 10am, so had the whole day
to do applications and my shorthand course). I applied to seven jobs
that day. However, Clare’s link on the job search system didn’t work. This
wasn’t the first, second or even 10th time this had happened
and I was used to it. I looked up the company who had posted the job and went
to their site, but the job was no longer listed. Thinking nothing of it other
than mild disappointment, I assumed my seven other job applications that day
(let alone the seven or so I had done earlier in the week) would more than meet
the minimum of three I had to apply to.
A week later, Clare saw that I hadn’t applied to the job she had
selected. I explained what had happened and about the 14 other applications I
had done that week, which she could see online too, but she said she would
“have” to sanction me. A sanction is a thirteen week suspension of your JSA.
For me, this was frustrating. But for someone who depended on that money to pay
bills, or rent, or to eat? How is that possibly going to help them find work?
What’s more, it was the dreadful website system that had caused this problem in
the first place. It wasn’t my fault they had listed a job that no longer
existed. And now I had lost my only source of income despite having applied to
over 250 jobs in three months. (During this week I had also been rejected from
a £17,000 a year job working for Eurostar as a part-time copy-writer, because I
was ‘overly skilled for the position’. That phrase is the one which always left me feeling utterly hopeless and lost. How can you ever be over-skilled for
something? Surely that’s just a benefit?).
Annoyed about the lack of common sense, discretion, and the injustice I
felt I had received due to incompetence elsewhere, I appealed the decision.
Almost absurdly, whilst the appeal is on-going you still have to attend the job
centre every week and continue to meet all the requirements they place on you,
even though you are no longer getting anything from them in return expect a
smug superiority and the feeling of being the base of society. My first appeal
was rejected by the middle of March. I later found out that the people who
judged my appeal were the same people who enforced the sanction…because that’s
a fair system. From my viewpoint, it appeared no logic or thinking had gone
into the decision; the circumstances and my records had clearly not been looked
at. So I appealed again.
Luckily, by the middle of March 2013, some former colleagues had
recommended me for a job and I had been offered a part-time position in a shop.
The sanctions no longer mattered and I gladly signed off, hopefully to never,
ever go through this situation again. My second appeal was still pending and I
heard nothing about it once I singed off.
In April, I was offered an interview for a graduate position in London (my 286th job application).
Ten days later I was offered the job and moved down to the South East in May,
as I had always suspected I would end up having to do. My quest to find a
graduate position had finally ended, and I was even working in something
vaguely close to my original hopes and getting paid far more than I had ever
hoped. A far cry from the dark days of December when I had lost all self-esteem
and belief in myself and for the first time since being a young child, had at
one point broken down in tears because of the hopelessness. JSA gladly faded
from memory until one day in July, a whole six months after I was first
sanctioned, I received a random payment into my bank account. No letter, phone
call or email, just a payment that matched the exact amount I had not been paid
whilst sanctioned. I had to phone up to clarify.
I was lucky JSA was merely there to help me afford travel, a phone and
to slowly clear my credit card and overdraft debts. Had I depended on that to
survive, I don’t know what I would have done. I was wrongly, unfairly and
pointlessly sanctioned by an over-zealous and incompetent service which does
not help those it is supposed to. It demoralises, demonises and ridicules those
that use its service, making them jump through higher and higher hoops and
punishing them for petty and minor things. And I had been lucky enough to avoid
the work-fare scheme!
I doubt I am the only person to experience this, and if you haven’t, I
sincerely hope you never have to.
Note: I kept a record of all of my job applications as part of my requirements to receive JSA and for personal records. I still have this file as testament to the amount of applications I sent.
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