Why doesn't anybody want to work?

I'd been booked to run a CV Writing training course yesterday, on behalf of a local charity.  The course was free for people to attend, as long as they met the simple criteria of being out of work and looking for employment.  That, according to government statistics, applies to a lot of people, so you'd think the course I was running would be well-attended, right?  Well...wrong, actually.

I arrived at the training venue, to be met by the man from the charity (who incidentally was being made redundant himself the next day).  He told me that he was sorry, but out of the fifty people scheduled to attend, only eight had actually bothered to turn up.  A few had called beforehand to say they were ill, or going to the dentist, but the majority just hadn't come in.  He'd called the Job Centre to ask if any of their candidates wanted to fill the empty spaces, but no.  Nobody there seemed interested in learning about how to get themselves ready for employment with a new CV.

Now I know what you might be thinking, and yes, I did wonder if my reputation had gone before me and these people just didn't think I was a very good trainer!  But that aside, if I was looking for work and somebody offered me a free place on a training course designed to help me out, wouldn't I be mad not to take it?  I really don't want to come over all Daily Mail here (something I'm a bit paranoid about!) but seriously - why don't people want to do anything other than seemingly sitting around, moaning about their lot in life whilst doing absolutely nothing to try to alter it?  I say 'seemingly' because whilst that may not be what's actually happening, that's certainly what it looks like.  This training course wasn't the first that had been organised for unemployed people, with the vast majority not actually bothering to come along after they'd booked a free place (which still has to be paid for by the charities organising them, by the way).

I've lost count of the number of people I've known over the years who have just shrugged and said something like "there's just no jobs" when I've asked how they're getting on looking for work.  No jobs at all?  Really?  Have a look on a website like fish4jobs, or get a copy of the local paper on a Thursday.  Jobs aplenty.  Why not be a bit creative, if you think there really are no jobs, or at least none available to you?  Grab the Yellow Pages (even easier now with yell.com) and make a list of all the companies you think it'd be good to work for, then write a tailored letter to them with a good CV.  That's a tip I give my CV clients when they say something like "there's no jobs out there", but hardly anybody actually does it.  Yet it works.  I've done it myself, and whilst it's time-consuming and you don't hear from the majority of the companies you write to, I managed to get two jobs doing just that.  I've also recruited people for companies I've worked for who have sent in their CV on the off-chance that they might get a job from it.  Sometimes you can just be in the right place at the right time.

I'd have told all this to the missing forty-two people on my training course yesterday, had they wanted to hear it.  But then it's probably far easier and more comfortable to sit at home watching Jeremy Kyle and insisting there aren't any jobs out there instead.