I attended a couple of session with an employment advisor for disabled people. I honestly want to get back to work and I am about to get a qualification. He gave me some advice:
* Go to civil service portal and apply to all office based jobs, even those that I am completely unqualified for.
* Also, not having a clue of how to do the job or even what the job entails is completely not a problem.
* Go to a charity and ask them for advice. It turned out that the charity had absolutely nothing available and was specialised for older people asking their employers to make workplace adjustments.
* Apply for everything under the sun. If I cannot do my job, lose my benefits and get fired, that is not a problem. "You have got to accept some risks if you want to improve your situation."
* Try to wheedle more money from the local council.
* Be more positive, smile more.
I cannot think about anything more useless than the "advice" I was given. Pic not related.
I had a similar experience with an employment advisor for mentally ill people. I think they were more suited for people who are totally fucked up with no experience and no CV. All the advice was so general and not at all tailored to people with mental illness, she was teaching grandmother to suck eggs.
I had the same idea. Well, at least we ticked a lot of boxes, we made a lot of paperwork and we managed to keep another useless person employed. Holy fuck, this country is so fucked up that it makes the Administratum from 40K look sane.
I think you got it right. I never thought that some people could sincerely need this kind of help.
By the way, I know people under ESA and all of them are perfectly able bodied, working cash in hand and enjoying the benefits. Probably the people that honestly want to get back in the workforce are a minority.
I had the last meeting with the advisor, and finally had enough. I told him to fuck off. I've never seen so much uselessness in a single place.
First, he tried to contact several government offices. None of them answered, assuming that he made the enquiries in the first place.
Second, his winning advice was to print paper copies of my CV and sent them to random employers, since "an email can be deleted immediately, a paper CV has more value." Some employees answered, all telling him to just email a CV in the website.
Third, when I asked what incentives are being given to the employers to hire disabled people, he answered "no tangible benefits apart for gaining potentially a great employer and good publicity for the company". I tried to tell him that money talks, bullshit walks, but he answered that "you only have to get lucky once".
That program is a total scam. More than one million pounds have been spent in an useless program that gives no real, tangible help to disabled people. This is Third World level of corruption and mismanagement.
If you ever see a leaflet or a poster in a public place advertising a gov't program to help disabled people to go into work, run away. It's a scam, and it is geared towards stopping your benefits since you are well enough to look for work by yourself.
Back in the day, 40k was satirical to some extent. What do you think they based all that on
Now let's all go watch the Adam Curtis documentary about the grace of caring machines or whatever it was called. Sums things up nicely. We individual humans are now little more in input/output units in some cont'd spreadsheet.