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From: blp Category: Life Date: 02 March 2008 Time: 09:50 AM Review: All fair enough and I'm sorry you're having such a shit time, but I gotta say, I did a similar scheme about ten years ago when I signed on in Islington and had a totally different experience. I'd heard you could do training in things like film editing and figured I'd ask about it to avoid having to keep applying for crap, unskilled jobs I didn't want. They told me the only thing available was IT training and I signed up for that. The centre was in Moorgate and full of odd, interesting people, from an Italian former shoe designer who, inspired by Damian Hirst, now wanted to be a conceptual artist, to and old pissy smelling bag lady type who'd apparently been big in computer programming back in the seventies. During lunch break we'd have conversations about things like Russelian paradoxes and black holes or I'd use the old fashioned black screen computers to learn touch typing, for which they had a programme. In the classes themselves, we were taught advanced Word skills and shown how to do a really decent looking, readable CV. For reasons not clear, we also had economics classes, which basically consisted of a very jovial man telling us super interesting, vaguely leftish stuff about the world of business. The options for going forward were to learn even more advanced Word skills and/or do a placement, not necessarily in IT. A very friendly, understanding lady handled the placements and sent me for arty ones, one at (I kid you not) a tiny avante gard music magazine run by two smart older guys in a tiny office in Islington (I really wanted this, but another candidate won out and the actual work probably would have been dull administrative stuff anyway), two at publishers, both of which I was offered. I took a position at a small publishers in Holborn, commissioning book jackets for academic books on Islam and a few on film, including a series by Christopher Frayling, and I did well at it and got to oversee some genuinely good designs. The whole experience from start to finish was more fun and more interesting than anything I've done to earn money since. Shortly after this, I heard the centre I went to had shut down. Probably too efficient, well resourced and funded.