The Training Gap

My husband has fallen victim to the training gap. A couple of months ago my husband's boss went bankrupt and he and his colleagues found themselves out of a job - not so Happy Christmas! But as with relationships you pick yourself up and start looking for the next thing that will suit you and, more importantly, pay the bills. These days, though, finding a new job has become a paperwork nightmare with cvs, lists of past employments, references and of course qualifications. And this is where my husband falls down. You see he went to the sort of school where careers advice involved handing out the address of the nearest dole office and as with most of his friends he left school with nothing. Now a few months off his fortieth birthday he has no official trade, no qualified profession, no noted skill set that can take him from job to job at a pay level he deserves after over twenty years of working. The problem is that when we were teenagers the country seemed gripped with the idea that academic qualifications were all that mattered and anything vocational was somehow inferior. School kids were encouraged to take A Levels in traditional subjects and those that did wanted to go onto universities, not polytechnics. In the midst of all this madness polytechnics all over the country changed their names to university, almost apologising for their roots in training people to do proper jobs. And then we all wondered why ten years later we could not find a plumber or a builder or even a mechanic! Thankfully this madness has now passed and school leavers are being offered apprenticeships and vocational training that will set them up for life, but for my husband, with half his working life still ahead of him, this is too late. So we are now reading through course lists from the local colleges hoping that he can finally get the qualifications to get the job he deverves - they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks but I am really hoping that is not true!