Hello.

Welcome to the first blog from the Jobseekers edition of the Quids In Readers Club money email. It’s designed for anyone who is thinking about how to either find a job or find a better paid, more secure, better suited job.

We know jobseekers. Some of you will have met me or my colleagues at Clean Slate Training & Employment. If you haven’t, all you need to know is we’ve been helping over 2,000 jobseekers help themselves for over 10 years now. The people we see are often fed up with the Job Centre and eager to find work. They just want to find an approach that works. The usual advice has not fit the bill, so what might?

Very often jobseekers turn the corner as soon as they have the chance to prove themselves. That’s why Clean Slate itself offers paid work to jobseekers whenever it can. A few hours delivering leaflets, helping around the office or passing on advice to other jobseekers has made hundreds of people we’ve seen stop and say, ‘I can work – now let’s find something in the real world’.

So, as an employer, we look at jobseekers differently to how the Job Centre or other employment support agencies look at you. It is pointless for us and for you to put you into the wrong role, so our first advice is to focus on what you’d really like to do. We have come up with a programme that employs people like you to help people like you and we have a short course called 7 Signs Training.

The 7 Signs Training offers practical ways to reflect on what you want and inspires jobseekers to feel much more confident about how much they have to offer. It helps people identify the right goals that match their skill set and their interests. It takes them through a process of learning how to present those goals to employers while also showing how clear they are about what bosses are looking for. And it teaches the importance of knowing when and how to ask for help.

I have written a book for jobseekers about the 7 Signs Training but our new partnership between Clean Slate and Quids in! magazine means we’ll be sharing some its secrets with you here in the Jobseekers edition of the Readers Club emails. (Of course, you can order the book, I’m Ready – 7 signs that show you’re right for the job from our publisher Tangent or Amazon.)

So, thanks for signing up. We hope the tips and tricks we share will help you find a new job that pays you well, gives you security, and makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning for.

Good luck. And let us know how you get on.

Jeff Mitchell

Founder of Clean Slate and Editor of Quids in! magazine