« Crafts | Main | 1:08:50/144 »
August 30, 2005
Another useless meeting
Nathalie had another unhelpfully depressing meeting with someone at the ANPE (French National Agency For Employment). This half day appears to have been an obligatory session for working on your resume and cover letters.
The guy running it seems to have been trying to convince Nathalie not to look for a job at all, even before she starts. What he said about her draft resume was in direct contrast to what another colleague of his at the ANPE recommended she do. He also counselled her not to bother looking in the area she expressly decided to consider on suggestion from other employment counsellors.
Nathalie said some people were helped there today, although lots dropped out. The people who were helped all knew precisely what they were looking for and either had just left school having trained to go into that specific line of work, or had been doing the same thing for 15 years, etc.
It's not clear to me why someone in that position would want to spend a whole Tuesday morning in a room probably without an Internet connection or telephone to mull over their resume and cover letter. My guess is that when you don't do much writing, you get rusty at it. Writing anything then seems so hard you need a huge amount of time to get started.
The same is probably true in getting back into the working (for money) world. Once out of it, you quickly forget most of us work at occupations:
- We would have no idea how to do had we not learned on the job for at least the first few months or years
- Could be done by just about anyone if they'd also had the time to learn on the job
- Involve very, very little in any way related to particular things we learned in school
Of course, if somebody found that out, not only would we all suddenly have job security problems, but also a bunch of other naked imperial flesh would become visible and they'd have to send people around to beat us up.
Posted by Mark at August 30, 2005 12:57 PM
Comments
I find your 3 bullet points to be very true, but also very encouraging. Once you do realize these secrets of the employment relationship, you are able to use them to your advantage. For example, you could feel empowered to change fields of work by knowing how to position yourself with regards to an employer in the new field:
You just need to convince the employer in the new field of be open to the concepts as well. In the end, it's all about learning and changing, not being someone who wants to stay in a rut. I think that's what school is supposed to be about, not learning something, but learning to learn about anything.
Posted by: Andy at August 30, 2005 06:46 PM
I wholeheartedly agree. And it's a shame we don't focus more on learning how to learn about stuff in school, since that's the essential valuable understanding you walk away with if things go well.
Posted by: Mark at August 30, 2005 10:10 PM