In the town of Royal Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire, 25-year-old Ben Gillet is in his cramped room lighting up a hand-rolled cigarette.
The window is ajar and a crisp cool breeze forces its way through, blowing the curtain into the side table.
He hasn't slept all night - a common recurrence when you're without work, he says. The last time he was employed was in 2008 - and now his days mostly consist of playing video games and consuming vast amounts of tea.
"I've played all my games to death, I watch TV series that I've watched three or four times through," he says.
"My confidence is practically nil. I have no reason to be confident these days - I don't know why I'm failing to get a job, because I get such little feedback that it just amounts to none."
He doesn't have a plethora of experience. Short stints at factories and restaurants make up the bulk of his CV, along with low-grade A levels in sciences and IT.
Full article HERE
Continuing the trend from yesterday's report of unemployment rates rising to 2.67 Million in the UK, the BBC posted this story about 2 guys in the UK, different ages and living under slightly different circumstances, basically suffering from the same issue.
This is pretty much the same boat that I and many others are on at the moment.
I'm 25, a University Graduate, with several different CVs tailored to various industries. If I do get an interview, I am overqualified or under-qualified.
One CV has me down as an experienced cleaner, I've worked in Iceland as a cleaner for a short while, and I worked part-time as a cleaner in a Family Health Centre. So my experience covers the Health & Safety issues of a public space that contains food, and the Health & Safety issues that cover a medical facility (such as the handling of Biological waste, etc).
On top of this I have experience as a Sales Assistant in a small comic shop, dealing with security and the safety concerns of keeping the shop tidy.
I've worked as a steward at Glastonbury Festival (healthy & safety, fire safety, and security), alongside working as a steward at several football matches and various other sporting events.
I've even done labour work on farms and small warehouses, and once had a position as a Saturday Helper at a local library.
When applying for a position with a shop or local business, this is the CV I hand in. It still gets me nowhere in the end, as I rarely hear back from the business, or I am once again under-qualified compared to other candidates.
My other CV is tailored towards the Media Industry, where I've got experience on student radio stations, experience with magazines (I worked for several weeks on SFX magazine), and I help (as previously mentioned) run a couple of web-communities and generally generate content for them.
Once again I am deemed under-qualified for most media positions.
From positions at a shop, or as a cleaner, to positions as a member of the editorial team on a magazine, or working on a web community for a newspaper, I am deemed to have not had enough experience.
The only way I can get this experience is by either working as an intern (which is likely to cause the cessation of my benefits, leaving me broke and unable to survive), or by getting a job within the relevant industry.
This is something that the Government, or the Benefits System, or whoever it is that is in charge of this system, doesn't consider. If I work over a certain number of hours, or volunteer over a certain number of hours, I get left out in the cold...yet if I don't work, or I don't volunteer, I can spend my life living off the system and the meager amount of money that they give my wife & I to survive.
David Cameron and Nick Clegg talk constantly about reforming the benefits system, getting people back to work, getting them off the system and supporting themselves, yet they ignore the reality of the situation. If a reform is going to happen to the system, it really needs to take into account that fact that if anybody makes any move to get themselves back into work, their support system is taken out from under their feet.
People like myself, or people like my wife, or even people like my friends from university, are left alone and broke for the sake of ticking us off of the list of unemployed and getting us out of one set of statistics and into another.
"Hey, these people aren't on benefits anymore, we can now say that statistics show that our system works!"
It doesn't, it doesn't work at all.
The system currently supports you if you want to spend the rest of your life doing nothing, but as soon as you make a move to try and support yourself, you are left out in the cold.
Where is our support?
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