After reading Lauren Currie's blog recently she had posted an interesting article portraying an insight into a victim of the current economic crisis.
The man had worked as a financial consultant for over 20 years as a fully paying tax citizen who reluctantly had to "sign on" after suddenly loosing his job, but when he went to do so, he was bombarded and harassed by contradictory, ambiguous and vague information and advice to the point that it was "decided" he was not entitled to receive unemployment benefits.
Eventually, after persistent applications it was decided that he was indeed entitled to receive unemployment benefits. However, much to his disbelief he found out, despite being a long time paying tax citizen who is married; he was in fact entitled to less than people who had never worked a day in their lives as they were not married to their partners.
This lead Lauren to question the design of this service and its shortcomings.
The only response to her article was that the Government were "thinking" about incorporating Job Centre Plus into Direct Gov.
I also know someone who is the same situation and the worrying problem he found was that there were around 40 or so jobs “advertised” over 5 or 6 pages…great, plenty of jobs!
Or not… upon closer inspection and investigation he found that most of these jobs were in fact the same job, reworded or with a later application deadline. Thus in fact the 40 jobs boiled down to around 12 or so jobs.
This made me think about the advertisements we see on Newspapers claiming that they have “100,000″ jobs waiting to be filled.
Is there?
During a conversation with Giorgio Giove, a point was brought up about criteria set out by some employers in their applicants.
I was flicking through an engineering/design magazine and was confronted with a large advertisement at the back roughly reading:
"Company x searching for Product Design Engineer
Starting salary £40,000
£100,000 guaranteed first year bonus
Honours Degree required from Cambridge
Must have at least 4 years experience required"
What I questioned from this was the clear elitism of the said company. Why was the applicant required to have graduated from Cambridge? What if a prospective applicant graduated from a different University but was a better designer than said applicant from Cambridge?
The point Gio questioned was why does the applicant need 4 years experience? Thus how do we expect our growing number of University graduates to enter a professional career when they are faced with job specifations that require experience and graduation from an elite University?
This is something that drastically needs addressing, especially in the current economic climate.
By the sounds, the Government needs Service and Interaction Designers... and fast! Unless they wish to face a devastating economic crisis!
