7cough9Senior Contributor
Seeking support with long term unemployment and associated hangups
I am both frustrated and ever increasingly despairing about ever being able to escape welfare dependence and oncoming anticipated poverty.
I am smart and educated but have recurrent problems securing and keeping a job.I am long-term unemployed, on Jobseeker, and assigned to a JobActive provider agency - specifically in the DES (Disability Employment Support) stream due to my recurrent episodes of depression and executive function deficits. Which I have been told are still not enough to secure me much from NDIS or anything from DSP.
In the decade plus that I have been variously unemployed and underemployed, I have churned through a half dozen of those job search agencies and a couple dozen individual assigned consultants. In all that time I encountered some consultants that had good intentions and sympathetic engagement with my concerns. However, I have never seen one that had the actual time, resources and skills to do much more with me than to say hi then bye in the hour of time we had for a token fortnightly appointment.
The recent glut of newly pandemic-displaced unemployed clients surely implies that I have no prospects of receiving the actual non-token attention I need from any of these JobActive agencies until well after the oncoming recession recedes and/or the unemployment system gets a massively funded federal revamp.
So, where elsewhere do I go to get the guidance and support I need?
Which brings me to being more specific about what I probably need and why I seem to fall between the stools of mental health support services and unemployment services. I seem to get put into the too hard basket by each.
I can talk about any and all of my self-perceived employment obstacles when in session with mental health professionals like a psychologist. However, they generally have little relevant knowledge and experience to help me evaluate whether some or any of those obstacles reflect real constraints of the current job market or the particular industries I had some experience with or hopes for. They can offer general encouragement or tips on personal management skills, but have no way of judging if I am wasting my time pursuing, say, IT consultancy freelancing work in the absence of specific certifications.
JobActive's job search consultants might not have that specific knowledge for all industries either, but would know some relevant facts to help a normally functioning person navigate job listings.
Unfortunately, I am apparently not such a normally functioning person, which typically leaves the consultants at a loss. For example, they tell me to put a "wished for job title" into the header paragraph of my resume, and then have no recourse when I tell them that every job title I can think of seems like a dead option.
My experience of browsing job vacancy listings and preparing applications is perhaps analogous to that of a nominally-straight-but-curious person skimming gay personals ads in a print-era magazine despite no idea what the sexual-preference-coding abbreviations and jargon mean. I have no real idea whether I am anything like what the posters want, and anticipate multiple embarrassing rejections and outright dismissals in the process of putting myself forward. That sort of hangup goes beyond mere ignorance of a novel domain, to inadequacy in being your authentic self.
I have done multiple vocational self-evaluation exercises, using various websites, psychometric tests and books like What Colour is Your Parachute, in the hope of identifying careers and/or training paths and matching my personal attributes and interests to some possible work fields and job titles.
However, in doing them by myself I keep running aground on uncertainties and dead ends. Sure, my Holland-code type result generated multiple high status career titles that could have been offered to me as a high schooler when choosing a higher education path. However, as a middle aged man without the savings to start a new multi-year tertiary course, I need some way to convert abstract psychometric results into more tractable leads.
Which maybe suggests that I need a specific occupational psychology professional for guidance. Or something like that. My understanding is that that specific profession is pretty much for high status paying clients, not underclass unemployed like myself.
Which points up the other major constraint. How can I access satisfactory guidance on the cheap, when the government funded consultancies already accessible to me are already exemplars of inadequate token advice?
I would have expected that disability employment services would have form in handing intersectional clients with both personal and practical deficits, but I have seen little evidence of it in person.
Surely I am not the first to wrestle with such issues. Anyone see a way forward?
I get very engrossed in things. 
