Unemployed

Work Experience : Jobs in Ireland

The Irish  Government “work placement program” is an initiative aimed at providing unemployed people with work experience .  Participants in the WPP  can retain their social welfare entitlements – but get no pay from the employers. It has not produced great results – and as at the start of  May 2010 just over one third of the  2,000 available places had been taken up.

As at 7th May 2010 there were 919 placements on the Work Placement Programme but there were still  1,589 vacancies . The scheme has been running for 12 months
There have been criticisms – such as the lack of any  bonus or welfare top-up offered by employers – when the reality is that it costs people to go to work in terms of travel, buying lunch and work clothes. The employer makes no contribution towards it.
It has also been alleged that some employers are simply using it to get access to cheap labour

Job Hunting Tips

Some tips for job hunters:

Look  online – well you’re here – so you are probably doing that anyway.

Search by both the town or area and the job title. Repeat your search every day. Use Google Alerts and register  with reputable job sites

Target companies organisations you’d like to work for. Visit their websites and look for employment information – you may find jobs that don’t appear elsewhere .

As well as online – look in local papers and shop windows.   A local paper can still be a useful place to find jobs in your town. We will try and find some jobs from local papers and post them on this site Jobsguideireland.com

Look further afield  don’t be put off by commuting. It can provide time for reading, learning or just thinking.

Aim high and low. Apply for jobs above and below the level you are currently (or were formerly) working at.

Apply to unconventional places. You may assume your local hospital, for example, doesn’t have any jobs you’d be suited to if you aren’t a healthcare worker – but you might be wrong.

Use your contacts when job-hunting wherever they work.

Changes to FAS Work Placement Scheme

We wrote about the FAS Work Placement Scheme that was launched back in June 2009.
Some changes to this scheme were announced recently – which will make it accessible to more people from December 1st 2009.
For unemployed participants the following criteria have been amended:

Recipients of most social welfare payments, including Job Seekers’ Allowance and Job Seekers’ Benefit, will now be eligible to apply. Unemployed graduates who are not receiving a social welfare payment will also now be eligible to apply.

2009 graduates are now also eligible to apply

The period, for which participants have to be in receipt of a social welfare payment in order to be eligible, has been reduced from 6 months to 3 months.

The requirement for a firm to have at least 10 employees has been removed.

•Previously firms could only participate if they did not have redundancies in the previous 6 months. This constraint has been reduced to 3 months. However, the level of redundancies in the last three months were less than 5% of the workforce, these firms will be eligible to participate.

The duration of the work placement has been increased to a maximum of 9 months. (was 6 months)
All changes take effect from December 1st 2009

Oxfam Sligo Voluntary Work

Oxfam Ireland Sligo shop is looking for volunteers to work in our exciting new shop! We need people to work with books, music, clothes, bric-a-brac and all the wonderful items in our shop. We can show you how to run the till or there is always plenty to do in the backroom. If you are interested please phone the shop at 913 8913 or go into the shop at 17 Grattan St.

Electrician Wanted for Voluntary Work

Oxfam Home in Francis St, Dublin 8 urgently needs a qualified Electrician to volunteer to help us test small appliances for electrical safety, prior to them being sold to raise valuable funds for Oxfam’s work.

Even if you can only spare a few hours during the week or on Saturday we would love to hear from you.

Address:

Unit 3,  79/88A Francis St, Dublin 8

Telephone: 01 402 0555

E-mail: oxfamhomefrancisstreet@eircom.net

Opening Hours:

Mon -Sat 9.30am-5.30pm

Jobs Websites in Ireland

While we here at Jobsguide Ireland try and bring you some job vacancies that you might not find elsewhere – we are a small fish in the big sea of recruitment websites in Ireland.
The main recruitment sites in terms of visits according to figures from Google – are : Fas.ie , Jobs.ie, Recruitireland.com, Irishjobs.ie, Loadzajobs.ie
The most visited of those 5 job sites in Ireland, according to Google , is  Fas.ie  closely followed by Jobs.ie with Irishjobs.ie taking third place and Recruitireland just beating Loadzajobs.ie into fourth place.
Google also shows up some interesting results. According to “Google Trends” – during the last 12 months of rising unemployment in Ireland – visits to these main 5 job web sites have fallen.
Google don’t give actual figures – but since peaking around Sept 2008 – unique visitor numbers  to all these sites have fallen since then. Going by the graph supplied on google   visits to these 5 sites have dropped  by as much as 100%  since September 2008.
If the information from Google is correct – it could be caused by one or more of the following factors.

a) Maybe unemployed people are just not looking for jobs and are happy to stay on the dole.
Or
b) People think or know there are no jobs available – so don’t bother looking as much.
Or
c) People may have left Ireland to work elsewhere or have gone back to their home country.
Or
d) Maybe other job websites like this one are attracting more visitors instead o

Other stats from Google – for the search term “jobs”  – show that the number of searches fo the word “Jobs” in Ireland has also not risen in the last 12 months. The number of searches for “jobs” is about the same now as it was 12 months ago. There was a peak after Christmas 2008 – but levels have dropped back and remained about the same since Feb 2009.

Have all the unemployed people stopped looking for jobs?

Free Third Level Courses for Unemployed

It may be too little , too late – but it’s better than nothing.
The government announced yesterday that unemployed workers will have access to 2,500 new places on part-time undergraduate and postgraduate courses from September 2009  -  according to the Minister for Education and Science, Batt O’Keeffe TD.

1,500 of them will be on a range of undergraduate certificate and degree-level programmes and 1000 will be part time postgrad courses for unemployed graduates.
All the courses will be those that are supposed to support the goals of the Irish Government’s “smart economy” plan . So these will include sectors such as medical devices, biopharmaceuticals, international financial services and  the food sector.

The details of when and where to apply are not yet available – but applicants must be unemployed for at least six months on 1 September 2009 to be eligible for a place on these undergraduate or postgraduate programmes.

Tuition fees will not be charged for these undergraduate and postgraduate courses though postgraduate students may be required to pay a nominal charge.

FAS Work Placement Programme for Unemployed Graduates

From 2 June 2009 if you have been getting Jobseeker’s Allowance (JA) for at least 6 months or if you are on short-time working you may be eligible for a new FAS activation programme.
The FÁS Work Placement Programme will provide 6 months’ work experience for 2,000 unemployed people who have been getting Jobseeker’s Allowance for the last 6 months.
There are 2 streams in this programme , in Stream 1 there are 1,000 places for graduates and in Stream 2 there are 1,000 places for unemployed people, with 250 of these places reserved for those aged under 25. Placements will be allocated to each FÁS region according to the number of people on the Live Register in that region.The work placements are for 6 months and while you are on this Programme you will continue to get your social welfare payment. Placements will be allocated on a ‘first come, first served’ basis.
To be eligible for Stream 1 of the Work Placement Programme you must:

* Be unemployed and getting Jobseeker’s Allowance for at least 6 months
* Have graduated before 2009
* Have been awarded a qualification at level 7 or higher on the National Framework of Qualifications

To be eligible for Stream 2 of the Work Placement Programme you must be unemployed and getting Jobseeker’s Allowance for at least 6 months.
If you are interested in participating in one of these programmes you may apply to your local FÁS office from 2 June 2009. FÁS will refer you to an employer who is registered as a provider with the Work Placement Programme. The employer may interview you as a potential participant in the Programme.

The Short Time Working Training Programme will provide 2 days training a week for people who are on systematic short-time working. Both of these programmes are administered by FÁS

Some Changes to the Work Placement Scheme from November 2009