Tomorrow I need to refer to Reemployment Orientation, or, as I marked it on my calendar, Reeducation Camp.
It's another of those things, like the ill-conceived "look for work on four separate days each week" standard, that is a good idea in principle but which I'm not so sure is going to work out in real life.
I'm pretty confident I was selected at random, from a pool of everybody who's been unemployed for the past month.
There may have been other factors -- like how this is the second time I've been on unemployment in as many years -- I don't know.
But I'd be pretty surprised if my degree and work experience were considered in my selection. And there's the rub.
I've got a BS degree in a field that's not doing a lot of full-time hiring, and about a decade's experience in a related field that's doing more full-time hiring but still not nearly as much as it was a few years ago. My needs are kind of different from somebody who hasn't finished college. Which isn't to cast aspersions on anyone without a degree -- to the contrary, there are lots of very smart people looking for work who just need some training.
And hell, maybe I will end up meeting with somebody who knows who's hiring programmers -- or at least migration techs. Maybe they'll have some good tips on punching up my resume, or hook me up with another temp agency, or have a site that gives me a better ROI for my search hours than CareerBuilder. I'd be grateful for any of those things.
But I can't help thinking that anybody who knows all that stuff is probably not going to be working for DES telling a random sampling of the unemployed how to look for a job.
But I'll go in with a smile and say please and thank you and be grateful for my unemployment check. Anything else on top of that is just Thanksgiving gravy.
I'll let you know how it goes. Probably.
