The empty CV (or resume in the USA)

I was taking my turn as a volunteer teacher at the computer class. The computers were in a refurbished church vestry in Shettleston, in the East end of Glasgow. For those who don't know Glasgow, it is one of the areas of the city that always got left behind in the good times and now is suffering disproportionately in the downturn.

The students were men and women who had been sent along by the job centre with a letter containing the warning that failure to attend may result in a loss of benefits. The course was designed by a retired teacher from the church to cover basic computer skills useful for jobseekers including searching for jobs online, applying for vacancies and preparing a cv. With almost all vacancies appearing online those without the skills to access to the internet are even more disadvantaged. The church had received a grant for the computers and saw this class as a way of trying to help the local community.

The regulars at the class knew only too well that the lists of jobs that appeared from the search engines weren't real. Many were still listed after the closing date had expired. The same jobs appeared on the websites of many agencies. A driving job may require you to have and use your own van; an impossible investment for many of these people. They also knew from bitter experience that working for an agency was often a way of making sure they stayed as a “casual” on the minimum wage. And we couldn't find any jobs that did not require some basic qualifications or experience or both.

Dennis had worked in care homes but the long shifts and unsocial hours had taken a toll on his health. As a non-driver he was reliant on buses to get to work and this added over two hours to his already long working day. The few agency care home jobs on-line were all vacancies he had seen before.

Jim was the last guy I worked with. He had been sent along and told to prepare a CV. I sat down beside him and he looked blankly at the keyboard. He had never used a computer. He admitted his spelling wasn't too good and finding the letters on the keyboard was painfully slow. We started at the top of the page with his name and address and date of birth. He was thirty five and had left school at 15. He had no qualifications from school and had not achieved any qualifications since. So there was the first blank: education and qualifications. How can you put a positive gloss on such a blank?

Next we started on employment history.

Most cv's progress in a logical sequence but his cv followed a predictably depressing path from YTS (Youth Training Scheme) for a year to a temporary warehouse job and then some some labouring jobs through agencies. And that was it. He had tried. He had done stuff. But despite the efforts he had made, he had never managed to climb above the very bottom rung of the ladder. He had spent all his working life struggling up onto that rung and then slipping off again. He had not sat and watched daytime TV 24/7 as some Daily Mail type commentators insinuate about those at the bottom of the pile. But however we re-arranged the words for employment history on the page they would only fill three lines. His dead pan, stoical acceptance of his lot didn't help me to make any more of it.

So we had almost half a page of A4 by using a big typeface.

Leisure interests usually fill a few lines at the end of a cv. I asked if he had any hobbies. "I keep pigeons" came the reply. We discussed his love of birds and for the first time in the afternoon his eyes lit up and he began to show some enthusiasm. When we came to write this down it added a single line "Hobbies - keeps and breeds show pigeons".

I showed Jim how to print and we played for a short while with the formatting of the document.

At the end of the class Jim went home with three printed cvs in his pocket. But I couldn't help feel I had failed to help him as the cv was the “thinnest” I had ever seen. He had been failed by the system since he left school and before. I wish I could be optimistic and say that he was going to use this opportunity to lift himself out of his situation. I fear though that the gulf between where he is and where the world has moved on to is so wide that this task may be beyond him.

Getting home from the computer club, the first thing I read on my computer screen was the facebook status of a friend: “People were created to be loved and things were created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.”