Being Unemployed
Four weeks ago tomorrow was my last day at work. As previously mentioned, I applied for Job Seeker’s Allowance. Since that time, I’ve returned to the Job Centre twice to ‘sign on’ as required and to show my ‘diary’ of what I’ve been doing…that is, looking for work.
I ended up finding around 15 employment agencies in the Rugby, Coventry and Birmingham areas but so far, I’ve only registered at about 5 of them. I’m saving the rest as I go along to add to my JobCentre diary. I’ve also applied for any number of jobs, oftentimes as simply as submitting my CV online, and sometimes in a little more complicated manner of completing an on-line application and submitting it with my CV – these have generally been through several different agencies.
I’ve also put my CV and a covering letter through the letter box of a solicitor in Coventry that does some immigration law work, knowing they didn’t have any openings, but just hoping something might come up. Plus, I check the web-sites of the local universities and colleges, as well as the Coventry City Council, to see what kinds of jobs they have going. I actually have a further three applications submitted that way.
This is all keeping me somewhat busy! However, I have been lucky enough to get two more job interviews.
One was with a new company that is just trying to get started. They are not yet registered with the authority that would allow me to actually give immigration advice and there just seemed something ‘iffy’ about the whole thing – they offered me a job on the spot, I told them I’d have to think about it and get back to them. A day or so later, an email from the director including a ‘start up plan’ that in the end looked like they were expecting me to tell them how I was going to bring in the clients. I turned that one down.
Tomorrow I have an interview with one of the local colleges for an administrative position. I’m overqualified for the role so happy that they called me at all. The pay is a little lower than I was looking for, but it’s way more than Job Seeker’s Allowance and would work. Plus it’s right across the street from one of my bus stops…needless to say, I want to do well in this interview and get the job. I can certainly always search for another job if this isn’t the right one for me.
Last week I also attended an appointment at one of the agencies where I’d registered. She took further information from me as to what kind of work might actually suit me and then had me do some of their assessments – working with word processing, Excel spreadsheets and a copy typing test. I did well with the first two, but was really happy with the typing test. When I looked at the page to type, I felt that I could complete the page in five minutes with pretty good accuracy if I was on ‘top form’. The test just happened to be five minutes and it is difficult to be on top form when using a strange key board that is a little wonky, but while I was waiting for my score to come up, I was fairly sure that I’d typed at least 70 words per minute. I’d managed to type about three quarters of the page when the time ran out. Result – 80 wpm, 100% accuracy. No problem there!
In the end, the agent agreed to look for temporary, part-time and permanent jobs for me. She felt that permanent was going to be the most difficult, temporary the easiest, but she had absolutely nothing for me at the moment. Oh well. Her eyes bugged out when she saw the result of my typing test, so at least I am fairly sure she’ll think of me when she has an audio-typing job. With any luck, I won’t need it.
