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7cough9
Contributor

Seeking support with long term unemployment and associated hangups

I am both frustrated and ever increasingly despairing about ever being able to escape welfare dependence and oncoming anticipated poverty.

I am smart and educated but have recurrent problems securing and keeping a job.I am long-term unemployed, on Jobseeker, and assigned to a JobActive provider agency - specifically in the DES (Disability Employment Support) stream due to my recurrent episodes of depression and executive function deficits. Which I have been told are still not enough to secure me much from NDIS or anything from DSP.

In the decade plus that I have been variously unemployed and underemployed, I have churned through a half dozen of those job search agencies and a couple dozen individual assigned consultants. In all that time I encountered some consultants that had good intentions and sympathetic engagement with my concerns. However, I have never seen one that had the actual time, resources and skills to do much more with me than to say hi then bye in the hour of time we had for a token fortnightly appointment. 

The recent glut of newly pandemic-displaced unemployed clients surely implies that I have no prospects of receiving the actual non-token attention I need from any of these JobActive agencies until well after the oncoming recession recedes and/or the unemployment system gets a massively funded federal revamp.

So, where elsewhere do I go to get the guidance and support I need?

Which brings me to being more specific about what I probably need and why I seem to fall between the stools of mental health support services and unemployment services. I seem to get put into the too hard basket by each.

I can talk about any and all of my self-perceived employment obstacles when in session with mental health professionals like a psychologist. However, they generally have little relevant knowledge and experience to help me evaluate whether some or any of those obstacles reflect real constraints of the current job market or the particular industries I had some experience with or hopes for. They can offer general encouragement or tips on personal management skills, but have no way of judging if I am wasting my time pursuing, say, IT consultancy freelancing work in the absence of specific certifications.

JobActive's job search consultants might not have that specific knowledge for all industries either, but would know some relevant facts to help a normally functioning person navigate job listings.

Unfortunately, I am apparently not such a normally functioning person, which typically leaves the consultants at a loss. For example, they tell me to put a "wished for job title" into the header paragraph of my resume, and then have no recourse when I tell them that every job title I can think of seems like a dead option.

My experience of browsing job vacancy listings and preparing applications is perhaps analogous to that of a nominally-straight-but-curious person skimming gay personals ads in a print-era magazine despite no idea what the sexual-preference-coding abbreviations and jargon mean. I have no real idea whether I am anything like what the posters want, and anticipate multiple embarrassing rejections and outright dismissals in the process of putting myself forward. That sort of hangup goes beyond mere ignorance of a novel domain, to inadequacy in being your authentic self.

I have done multiple vocational self-evaluation exercises, using various websites, psychometric tests and books like What Colour is Your Parachute, in the hope of identifying careers and/or training paths and matching my personal attributes and interests to some possible work fields and job titles.

However, in doing them by myself I keep running aground on uncertainties and dead ends. Sure, my Holland-code type result generated multiple high status career titles that could have been offered to me as a high schooler when choosing a higher education path. However, as a middle aged man without the savings to start a new multi-year tertiary course, I need some way to convert abstract psychometric results into more tractable leads.

Which maybe suggests that I need a specific occupational psychology professional for guidance. Or something like that. My understanding is that that specific profession is pretty much for high status paying clients, not underclass unemployed like myself.

Which points up the other major constraint. How can I access satisfactory guidance on the cheap, when the government funded consultancies already accessible to me are already exemplars of inadequate token advice?

I would have expected that disability employment services would have form in handing intersectional clients with both personal and practical deficits, but I have seen little evidence of it in person.

Surely I am not the first to wrestle with such issues. Anyone see a way forward?

 

 

8 REPLIES 8

Re: Seeking support with long term unemployment and associated hangups

Hi @7cough9 ,

 

I can generally relate to your employment frustrations. I sought help ages ago hoping to resolve my own long-term unemployment, but it too, alas, proved to be useless.

 

TBH, a lot of what you said went right over my head. You seem to have a much better understanding of the complicated ins-and-outs of getting employment then I've ever had. I was always told it all comes down to knowing the right people to assign you the right job; an asset I've sadly never had.

 

Before coronavirus hit, there was talk amidst the government of replacing the existing employment system with a new system called “Individual Placement and Support”; to insure that unemployed people were all carefully assigned the best possible jobs for their own personal needs. But, like I said, that was before coronavirus hit, so I can't say whether or not they plan to follow through on that now.Smiley Sad

 

Sorry I can't be more helpful.Smiley Sad

Re: Seeking support with long term unemployment and associated hangups

Hi @7cough9  welcome to the forums. I too am long term unemployed. I have a job active and they are no help at all. They also put me in the too hard basket. Have you thought about taking up voluntary work to upskill, I do voluntary work 3 days a week to learn retail skills and they have taught me a lot.

It also keeps me active so I'm not bogged down with negative thoughts. I wish you all the best and hope that you find a good job 

Take care and stay safe🌼🌸🌺 

Re: Seeking support with long term unemployment and associated hangups

Hi and welcome, @7cough9 , it's good you've joined. 

 

 


@7cough9 wrote:

I am long-term unemployed, on Jobseeker, and assigned to a JobActive provider agency - specifically in the DES (Disability Employment Support) stream due to my recurrent episodes of depression and executive function deficits. Which I have been told are still not enough to secure me much from NDIS or anything from DSP.


I am so sorry that you are counted as having a disablity according to job seeking functions, but not according to being eligible for the DSP. That really sucks 😞

 

 

 


@7cough9 wrote:

Which points up the other major constraint. How can I access satisfactory guidance on the cheap, when the government funded consultancies already accessible to me are already exemplars of inadequate token advice?


I am not sure where you would go to get the guidance and support you need with job seeking, so I'm sorry, I have no advice as to the way forward. With regard to psychologists helping, you seem to be saying that they haven't helped you at all... All I can hope is that you can keep trying till you find a psychologist that does help, under the Mental Health Care Plan system of up to 10 rebated sessions per year.

 

Wishing you many best wishes on your journey...

Re: Seeking support with long term unemployment and associated hangups

Hi @7cough9 ,

 

You sound really clever, are you able to tell me what qualifications you have? Finding suitable employment is really hard - or at least, I have always struggled with it, too. I have had a lot of different jobs, but I always struggled to fit into work-place culture (probably because I like being alone a little too much.)

At the moment I am getting a full financial scholarship to study for my PhD, which is a job that suits me, because I am at home and I get to work to my own schedule. I can take a day off whenever I need it and I don't usually have to answer to anyone. 
What are your interests? What work have you done in the past?

Re: Seeking support with long term unemployment and associated hangups

 


@Sahara wrote:

You sound really clever, are you able to tell me what qualifications you have? [...] What are your interests? What work have you done in the past?

Thanks for your interest. I have a BSc in computer science, which I have some interest in as a topic, but little interest anymore for an IT career. I had repeated experiences of falling short in needed aspects - like not reliably meeting deadlines, and having to endlessly chase skills updates for professional development and recertification. I tried getting a Masters in a specific future-demand technology that might  set me up as a consultant. Unfortunately I had to drop out after struggling badly with self-directed research project work.

I did some courses around linguistics, and I have an interest in writing and communication. That saw me enjoying my attempts to get into closed captioning, and into narrating  texts for the visually impaired. In those cases I proved to lack in secondary aspects - specifically/respectively needing a gunner's keyboard speed to caption,  and needing a suitable home recording space/equipment/technology for narration.

Similarly with my stab at English tutoring.  I enjoyed the exercise of assembling student tasks to cover a curriculum, but I couldn't get to grips with the reality of students who didn't apply themselves, and had to be evaluated and failed.

I have variously been rejected from - or retreated in defeat from -  phone customer service and sales; manual labour and gardening; charity donation soliciting; mental health group facilitation; theatrical performance; and market research interviewing.

Gig work has low bars to entry but also no barriers to summary sacking. I was too slow to deliver takeout meals and groceries, and too scattered for scripted mystery shopping.

The best of the remaining bad options I had settled into was casual retail contacting for stock takes and merchandising, paid per assignment. That usually has low demands, such as having flexible completion dates.

The lack of direct supervision is a double edged sword. I can try things out and sometimes come up with problem solutions I am proud of. But there is no one coming out with me on site to train me up in basic skills that would make me efficient enough to bring the effective hourly rate to something really worthwhile. I couldn't live on the income from already intermittent schedules,  and then all was suspended for the pandemic.

I wish I could do data entry, but my keyboard speed limitations seem to exclude  that. Clerical/admin roles might suit, but entry level roles favour the big pool of discardable youth candidates, and who I could surely not compete with.

I could probably be a good technical writer, but I was advised by people in that field that you get those roles by coming up through the particular industries that you need to know about, like mechanical or chemical engineering or medicine.

As you see, I can find the barriers behind every opportunity. Is that a bad world or a bad mindset? I have no reliable way of knowing. Hence my search for guidance.

Re: Seeking support with long term unemployment and associated hangups

Hi @7cough9 ,

thanks for writing back, I can relate to your experiences, although my employment history is different to yours. 

It sounds like you have tried many things, which is to your credit! I am like that, too, I just keep going and keep looking for new opportunities. That's interesting that you have an interest in language, as I do too.  I can see from your writing that you have a talent in this area. I wonder do you like to read the dictionary page by page? Just curious, as that is what I am like. Smiley Happy I get very engrossed in things. 
I am sorry to read that you had to drop out of a masters degree program. Do you think that you may have been able to continue if you had more support from the university? It sounds like you were capable of doing the work, but being left to your own devices to try and steer your own project was not suited to you?

 

Re: Seeking support with long term unemployment and associated hangups


@Sahara wrote:

I wonder do you like to read the dictionary page by page?

[..]Do you think that you may have been able to continue if you had more support from the university? It sounds like you were capable of doing the work, but being left to your own devices to try and steer your own project was not suited to you?

 


I did do that dictionary scanning as a child, and now I indulge  something similar when answering qs and moderating posts on Quora.

The particular course I dropped out of no longer exists, but when I tried a different course later I tried to access the campus disability support services when I started failing again. That was even more dismaying, since the way it was beauracratically set up, I found out I was supposed to register myself before the start of semester as having diagnosed deficits that needed recognition. I basically had to tell them how I was going to fail in in advance. I didn't have a formal diagnosis then, and if I had thought I was impaired I probably would not have enrolled.  

Re: Seeking support with long term unemployment and associated hangups

Hi @7cough9 ,

 

sorry that I haven't replied until now, as I have been away on a short trip and not checking my notifications.

Yes, it's really hard dealing with bureaucracy, I agree with you on that. Everything is supposed to be set up to help people, but in fact it can make matters worse when there are so many policies that you are supposed to know about at University- but you don't know that you are supposed to know. 

I ask my PhD supervisors things all the time and they don't know the answers and they simply ask me to use the Internet to look things up! I get the impression that they don't care much- but who knows? I don't want to assume anything. I am relatively happy doing my research and therefore I let things slide and generally don't think about my supervisors, unless I have to. 

I hope you are able to continue looking for work, @7cough9 . I know it's really hard. I face unemployment too, once I complete my studies... I don't mind as much as I used to, as I am older now and feel as though I could take early retirement. But for those who need a job, it must be so difficult.

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