After 6 months of unemployment the Job Centre pledges to place you in a job or provide meaningful Training which will further your career prospects. With this day soon approaching I will soon be subject to this pledge. For many, I imagine, this will make the big difference and help them find work.

Me, I am dreading it.

It has all the hallmarks of another fight with the Job Centre as they either try to place me, or train me in something utterly irrelevant and pointless. For the most part the pledge is for simple untrained workers, so till training, construction work or telesales training may be the approach taken. I will not pretend I know everything but its going to be interesting to see what basic training is suggested to me and I am offered. I have already learnt in my Masters all about marketing, admin, negotiation, presentation, report writing and computer usage. I know how to do data entry and have had experience answering telephones. Just what will they try and teach me..its going to be interesting to see.

It got me thinking. In an ideal world, what skills would I be given. What keeps appearing on job applications? Being able to code in HTML has come up a few times, QuarkX - a program used in sales, or perhaps best of all Adobe Creative Suite, which has appeared many times as desirable.

If I was provided training in any of those it could make a big difference to the success of my job applications. I just cannot help but worry that in reality I will given a skill I will never use again, but there is nothing wrong in hoping.