So I have got a job in a popular hotel chain as a night receptionist and never having worked in a hotel before its opened my eyes to what goes on behind the scenes in a hotel. I never really thought much about it when I have stayed in hotels before as I never needed to but it's sure more complex than I ever thought. There is a lot more to running a hotel than just getting people in a room. I will post more on this subject soon when I have done a few more shifts but so far it's changed my view on hotels.
So it might as well be here, not that it can be anywhere else of course but you know what i mean. Blogs. Now there is a word that didn't exist when i first started on computers or the internet. Blogs, a hybrid word of web and logs, so technically it is just a log of someones on the world wide web. However this simple meaning has grown all out of proportions to its original meaning and now you have blogs about every single subject you could possibly think of. Such is the evolution of the internet. In the early days it was all about having your own web page on somewhere like geocities or angelfire where these garish sites would live telling you about cabbage farming in Ohio or how to build a garden shed out of matchsticks and some glue. These sites were there to show peoples passion about a subject that they knew a lot about and wanted to give others the wealth of their knowledge and this grew until you had websites scrambling for users to join them by offering you free webspace if you accepted an ad on your site. Then along came weblogging. This changed the internet for good. no longer did you have to learn some foreign language to get your info out there, you could just sign up for a blog and post everything you wanted to know on there and others could read it. Now don't get me wrong, i am all for it, i mean i own a blog right so it would be hypocritical of me to say no i hate blogs but i just feel we lost something along the way. Now most websites you see online are made by companies who specialise in webdesign and seo and getting your site high up in the rankings on Google or bing. Everyone's ideas now are confined to a blog or Facebook or twitter, you don't have people building their own surroundings for their thoughts any more. We have lost that from the internet and i feel sad about it, if you think for a moment what that means. We have given away the creation side of the internet to someone else in our quest for taking from the web and we don't give so much any more. So next time you are reading a blog much like this one, stop a moment and think "how would this have looked if this writer had made the site themselves?"
https://twitter.com/refuted/status/557667904922341378
https://twitter.com/guardiantech/status/557600131965386752
https://twitter.com/Mancman10/status/557581149846118400
https://twitter.com/refuted/status/557554588128382976
If you have read my previous 2 posts you will know how to do your initial signing on interview and how to do your job search. What about when you have to go to see your job coach/advisor?
You will be given a time when you have to go and sign on from your initial interview, you MUST attend this interview to be paid. If you do not attend you will not get your money. Also make sure you get to your interview on time or you can be sanctioned.
So you arrive at the job centre and will usually have to tell the receptionist that you are there to sign on. They will usually then ask for your booklet and ask you to wait in a seating area for your job coach/advisor to call you. When you are called your advisor will ask you to sit the other side of the desk from them.
Your advisor will ask you what steps you have taken to find work since you were last in there and this is where you get to show them your job search that i discussed in the last post. They will then make sure you have completed everything you agreed to do in your claimant commitment and if you followed my guide you will have completed it.
They may ask you for access to your UJM account but you can just tell them that it is not mandatory to allow them access and it is your account. You can refer them to this document https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/166488/response/410483/attach/html/4/UJ%20Toolkit%20Chp%203%20v37.0%2011.07.13.pdf.html which is the UJM toolkit that advisors have to follow when using UJM and it tells them on there that access is not mandatory so you can tell them that their own guidelines tells them its not mandatory and is illegal for them to ask for access. If they persist on asking for access ask to speak to the office manager and let them know your advisor keeps asking for access. This usually stops them straight away from asking for access again as they know they shouldnt be doing it and if you are ready to show you wont just lay down and roll over they back off. So no matter what pressure they put you under, dont allow them access, they just want this to look for ways to sanction you easier.
Your advisor may also ask for other things you have done or are going to do to look for work. Here you can say you will be contacting more employers, visiting more employers, visiting/phoning/emailing more employment agencies, checking UJM and other online job sites, asking friends and family for jobs, checking facebook, twitter, linkedin and other media online to find work.
Your advisor may be nice and helpful and genuinely be interested in helping you find work, they may be just interested in just getting you signed on and out of the office as fast as possible or they may be intent on being nasty to you and try to sanction you at any point. It just seems to be a lottery on who you get but just make sure you do everything on your Claimant Commitment form and there is little they can do to sanction you and if they attempt it and send it to a decision maker to see if you can be sanctioned, appeal it, if you have been doing everything on your claimant commitment form your appeal should be upheld and you will not be sanctioned.
The biggest advice i can give you is do everything you can to do everything you can on your claimant commitment form and dont give the dwp access to your ujm account and you will be more safe from sanctions than if you give them access and dont keep up with your claimant commitment agreements.
