When I became unemployed it’s that shame factor. That was the big barrier for me, I felt quite ashamed. I often found that I was not being shortlisted for jobs. I was competing against many people with similar or more suitable backgrounds. You feel like you lose your skills as well, the longer you stay out of work. I felt very disempowered.
Our job club aims to give people the skills and confidence to get back into the world of work. We do this by running dedicated sessions on CVs, interview skills, job search techniques.
We run one-to-one support, guidance, and mentoring to really get alongside people and find out what we can do to help and I think that’s what really differentiates us from other job clubs. It’s just overcoming that initial step, to take that step and go along somewhere. It pointed me in directions, it gave me hope, it was saying, ‘look, explore this, explore that.’
Where I was very limited and closed, and said, ‘I’ve done this all my life, that’s all I know. So job club opened it up for me, and said, ‘you can do all of these.’
The job club was good in a number of ways, in terms of the actual support that you got, the fact that you were there with people in a similar position to yourself, it made you feel that you weren’t alone as well as time to concentrate on things like writing your CV or interview skills.
I found it really, really encouraging meeting people who were also out of work so we encouraged each other, it wasn’t just the advisers encouraging us, we encouraged each other. I’d recommend CAP Job Clubs for the friendship that they offer and for the specialist help that they offer.I think that it’s a brilliant balance of the two.
Job clubs really work. At our first job club, five out of nine people got into jobs or self-employment. CAP job clubs run all up and down the country. We’d love to welcome you along to your local CAP job club.
