Another Wednesday, another trip to the still unfinished JobCentrePlus. Next time I attend, it will be a whole new experience!

Rather than spending three minutes with me, in which time they locate my file, ask me to sign, and thank me for attending, they will spend a whole 10 minutes! This will give them time to discuss my jobsearch activities and discuss other routes to finding work. Whilst I am appreciative of their assistance, I have my reservations.

I used to queue for an hour to attend within my allotted half hour slot. (This involved taking a ticket a la supermarket delicatessen counter). I now have an exact appointment time for the specified 10 minutes. As my previous appointment would average three minutes, they are going to spend three times as long with each job seeker. This would imply that they have three times as many advisors working for them now, and I don’t remember seeing any such jobs advertised! Hopefully, it doesn’t mean that the waiting time will increase to three hours, unless they are going to pay an hourly rate for attending!

The extra focus on job searching would also imply that all staff have recently undergone a period of training to make best use of the Jobseekers appointment time. While I’m sure that they will use the extra 7 minutes to their full effect, I spend the majority of the week on my job search, and I’m not sure that this time is going to help me focus any better. I fully except the seven minutes to be equally divided between explaining my situation and finding that there are no suitable vacancies.

I already know that the work I am looking for is generally not advertised via the JobCentre even if it has been upgraded to Plus. For now, I’ll remain open minded and hope that the main change I see isn’t the transformation from a yellow colour scheme to green.


posted by Martin Wright at 11:09 am | Link