5-a-day

The government health department, and the bandwagon riding supermarkets, push the 5 different fruit and vegetable portions a day as an aid to sensible eating, to ensure you get the right nutrients and so forth.

Maybe the DWP/Jobcentre should take a lesson from them. I recently signed on for a week or so, as casual work had dried up, they required me to:

• Write to at least 2 employers a week
• Phone at least 2 employers a week
• Contact Jobseeker Direct at least 1 time a week
• Ask family, friends and people I have worked with before
• Look on the Internet daily and in an industry journal weekly.

I make that five 'active' tasks and three relatively 'passive' tasks each week. My experience of the jobcentreplus is they don't even follow up whether you're doing that much. I think 5-a-day 'active' attempts to find work is something worth encouraging, and is what I want to try and do now.

So my 5-a-day is to try and actively pursue 5 potential lines of employment for 5 days of the week. That's 25 things a week.
My aim is also to try and explore different options, and potential new careers. So I'm going to try to aim to keep something of a balance between applying for these five types of work opportunity:

• Positions that closely match my usual role in the Entertainment industry, typically in response to adverts.
• Casual positions within my area of expertise in the Entertainment industry, typically these will have to be cold contacts.
• Medium term to Permanent positions, probably away from my usual role, but remaining within Entertainment.
• Casual, Temporary or Short-term work outside the industry. (e.g. Agencies and McJobs)
• Medium to long-term positions outside the industry, with a view to a potential long-term change in career direction.

The balance won't be perfect, I'm not going to wait till tomorrow to apply for a job I like because I've 'filled my quota' for that type of job for that day, but I'll see how the balance goes, and will try and keep an honest tally at the end of blog posts. Think I'll make a chart to record my progress...

5-a-day: Bad day, 0/5.