This Job Can Send You Spiralling Into Depression (Employment Advice Worker)

Member Name: anonymili

Product:	Employment Advice Worker
Date:	29/06/07 (595 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: some rewarding days when you get someone into a job

Disadvantages: the rewarding parts of the job and very few and far between

I’m going to discuss Employment Advice Workers in respect of people working with unemployed people also referred to as jobseekers.

I worked for over 3.5 years in training providers – working with long term unemployed people for the last 2 years in one job as a Team Leader but often having to cover for staff shortages so working directly as an “Employment Advice Worker”, although in my particular company we were called Client Advisors. The “clients” were long term unemployed people sent to us from the Job Centre to gain various skills which I’ll discuss shortly.

This is not a job for the faint-hearted. It’s quite stressful but can also be rewarding. In the 2 years I worked at my last job I have to admit that I found 90% of the time I was stressed out and about 10% of the time I found the job rewarding. If I hadn’t worked with such a good bunch of colleagues I think I would have gone mad.


A TYPICAL DAY

We would start work at 09:00. The clients were supposed to attend our centre from 09:00 to 15:30 with a 30 minute lunch break and two 15 minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The reality of it was they would mostly stroll in whenever they felt like it. No matter how much we tried to drum into their heads that they should treat their time at the training centre as if they were at a “real job” they did not listen and short of dismissing them all and having their benefits stopped there was little we could do about the time-keeping aspect of it all. During the first week they attended what were mostly 13 week courses they would have “induction” which would include completing all the relevant paperwork about their work experience and qualifications, health and safety issues, ensuring they were all aware of where fire exits and evacuation procedures were. This could take anything from one to three or four days due to sporadic attendance. They were advised clearly from the start that they were allowed 5 days absence during the course, not including job interviews. Most of them used up their 5 days absence in the first 2 or 3 weeks as latenesses were also deducted out of this attendance.

So we have people being difficult from the start, moaning and groaning about how they’re never going to get a job, the job they want to do they can’t get. We would hold discussion sessions to discuss what sort of job they wanted against what sort of job they could realistically expect to get. Seriously how much do you think you could take of someone insisting they wanted to be an airline pilot or a music producer when they haven’t got the most basic of qualifications such as GCSEs, any experience in music, no driving license and it’s not cheap to get a pilot’s licence. I certainly don’t want my tax money going towards flying lessons for people who will get their licence and then decide they don’t want to do that job. The reason I say this is we paid for people to gain forklift licences and you would not believe how many people did absolutely nothing with these qualifications. They were under the impression that, with no experience whatsoever, they could get a forklift license and an employer would suddenly pay them £10 an hour to drive an expensive vehicle around their warehouse when the person had no concept of how a warehouse operates. They were mostly unwilling to even participate in work experience in a warehouse to find out if it was an environment they were willing to work in. Am I sounding negative? I won’t even pretend that I’m not.

We would hold interview techniques sessions, to discuss how to behave appropriately in an interview. We would do role plays with them and we (the staff) would pretend to be an interviewee and ask a couple of the clients to be the interviewers, give them a sheet with random interview questions on and ask the remaining clients in the room to take notes and write down what we did well and what we did wrong. I would flounce into the room without knocking, chewing gum, put my feet up on the table, swig diet coke out of a bottle, read my horoscope, put my handbag and a couple of carrier bags of shopping on the interview tables and respond very rudely to the interviewers questions, continually look out of the window and not meet the interviewers eye and when asked if I had questions, I would ask things like “so when do I get a pay rise?” and “can I smoke in the office?” and then when we asked the clients what we had done wrong, they would barely have written down two or three mistakes. So that was our job to tell them what you definitely shouldn’t be doing in an interview and then to show them how to behave correctly during an interview. Even the most basic things like telling people to brush their teeth before going to an interview, wear clean clothes, have a shower, it was like talking to children sometimes. When I took that job, I honestly never envisaged that, as an adult, I would have to tell able bodied and able minded people that they should have a shower or brush their teeth!

We would hold discussion sessions about writing covering letters when applying for jobs, how to include only relevant information to your application. Would you believe how many people would include totally irrelevant information such as their religion, music tastes, or even the fact that they owned cats and dogs on their cover letter for a job? For those who weren’t computer literate we would actually type up their CVs for them, give them lots of originals and give them their CV on a disk and keep a copy in the office in case they lost ALL of their paper CVs and their disk (which actually happened quite often).

We would also arrange work placements for clients in the relevant field of work they were looking for, according to what was on their Jobseekers Agreement from the job centre. This was a real nightmare; as often they would insist that they didn’t want to do what was on their jobseekers agreement. If they were down for retail, we would try to organise a work placement in a retail outlet, be it a supermarket, charity shop, clothes shop or similar. I would say about 80% of the time they had a problem with the work placement arranged. Thirty minutes from their hone on a bus was too far to travel for them, even though we paid for their weekly travel-card. They didn’t want to work in this particular town as they knew too many people who hung around the shopping centre. Amazing how many people refused to work in a charity shop “I wouldn’t be seen dead in a charity shop and you want me to work there for free?” they would complain. Sorry, but what’s so bad about working in a charity shop?

As well as covering letters, interview techniques and CV writing, we would cover areas such as completing application forms, what to wear to interviews, dealing with rejection and other relevant job searching related topics. Sometimes clients would request one to one help as they were nervous about attending an interview and we would cover this in a meeting room designed for one to one meetings which had glass panels for security reasons, one could never tell if someone was going to turn around and start being abusive towards a member of staff.


WHAT ELSE DOES THE JOB INVOLVE?

As with many jobs which work closely with government departments there is a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy involved in this job. Lots of forms need to be completed in triplicate or more with copies going to the local job centre, district offices, the client and the client’s file in your office.

There are timesheets to be completed for each every client every week with details of their latenesses, absences, doctor’s appointments, visits to their job centre, etc. Reviews on clients’ individual progress throughout their training programme need to be done regularly; these need to be carried out with the clients on a one to one basis to ensure they were getting what they need whilst on the programme as well as fulfilling their agreement to attend work placements and job interviews as organised by staff.

One also needs to keep weekly or monthly records of how many interviews they’ve arranged for clients, how many of their clients they got into jobs, how many work placements were arranged, how many clients had to be dismissed for non-attendance or unacceptable behaviour, etc.

On top of this, there are regular internal audits carried out by internal auditors and external audits carried out by the job centre and inspections carried out by the Adult Learning Inspectorate to ensure you are delivering the training programmes as per your contract. The Adult Learning Inspectorate is more concerned about the touchy feely side of things such as “Are the learners (read clients) having a good experience?” No one seemed to be bothered about what awful experiences the staff were going through and staff used to run themselves ragged trying to prepare for audits whilst also trying to give the best service to the clients. This did not just apply to my company and/or office as I worked for a similar organisation prior to this role and the same thing happened there - when you’re advised that an audit is coming up and of the date, all hands on deck to make sure the branch passes with flying colours, which often detracted from what we were really supposed to be doing which was attempting to help people get back into work.


WHAT DOES IT PAY

Salaries for these types of roles vary, you can earn anything from £15,000 to £25,000 a year depending on the sort of organisation you work and you can earn target related bonuses on top of your basis salary in some companies too, although in the last company I worked for the bonuses were very rare as it’s difficult to meet targets when you’re constantly short 2 or 3 staff in an office of 10 people! You could be set targets around how many people you get into full time work or how many people you successfully get into a relevant work placement. Working for training providers who work with job centre clients you usually have targets set with the job centre which are related to the actual contract. Some contracts expect you to get 35% of clients into full time sustainable* employment, some of them expect 50%; it all depends on what targets the company has agreed to meet.

If you can stick this job out for a while and do it well, and are interested in moving up, there are various other roles in this industry that you can go for. You can go for a supervisory or managerial position at branch level, you can apply for roles at head office or you can leave the business completely and go into recruitment consultancy to earn lots more money and be hated by all! You can even go backwards and apply for a Client Advisor role in the job centre, although as far as I’m aware, these jobs don’t pay too well and you’re better off applying for jobs where you are actually rewarded fairly for your work.


WOULD I RECOMMEND IT?

Overall I personally wouldn’t want to work in this sort of role ever again. I and my colleagues took a lot of verbal abuse in the job from clients for varying reasons and often had to put up with the threat of physical violence too. The rewarding aspect of the job is ok – but you first have to get people to take a job and all too often there are 1001 reasons why long term unemployed people refuse jobs. Many people are too used to being on benefits and will not have money to travel to an interview but always have enough money to buy cigarettes and put credit on their mobile phones so they can speak with their friends mostly when you’re trying to conduct a review meeting with them or give them details of how to get to an interview.

It was very frustrating for me personally, as an independent person, who’s always strived to stay in full time employment, pay her own way and progress up the career ladder, to work with people who were mostly devoid of ambition. On the whole the negatives far outweigh the positives and I would rate this type of work as a rather low 3 out of 10. I think you need to be far more saintly than I am to be successful in this role. In the 2 years I did the job, I had 8 or 9 staff come and go because they couldn’t handle the stress of the job.


NB: This clients referred to in this review were all in receipt of jobseekers allowance which meant they were supposed to be available for full time employment as agreed with their job centres and they were all able bodied and able minded. There are different programmes available for people with disabilities with different staff with more specific qualifications to help this group of people.

* sustainable employment means a job that lasts for at least 3 months and not temporary or contract work.

Summary: Recommended? I wouldn't do this job again no matter how much I was paid!