I had recently returned from Australia and was doing an NVQ2 in Information Technology. I was actually teaching others rather than learning, the instructor was so busy marking our work he didn’t have time to do any teaching, so he relied a lot on those who knew our stuff and were there to get the qualification?

One day I returned from a job interview to learn that someone had come to assess his performance and, quite at random, chose MY portfolio to look at. They said “Why is this person doing an NVQ2 when they should be doing an NVQ3?”

Part of the course required us to learn how to write a CV when I had a perfectly good one already. I objected that we shouldn’t be required to state our age and I was proven right.

A week or two later I mentioned this to the lady who informed me what had happened while I was attending the interview. The people interviewing me noted that I hadn’t stated my age, and I said that I was confident enough of by persuading someone to employ me. By stating my age on my CV I might prejudice my chances of getting an interview!

The long and the short of it was that I got the job 😀 I was right and the person who professed to teach us how to write a CV was wrong!

It’s useless information anyway when many job applications in U.K. require filling in a form rather than submitting a CV. If they’re not allowed to ask your age they’ll get around that by demanding educational history back to secondary school, information that serves no other purpose than to expose the age of a mature student like myself – I left school at 16 with 3 ‘O’ Levels but graduated with a BA in philosophy when I was 40.

But when all is said and done you have to get past that interview, and that’s the difficult part! I was doing a temporary civil service job and had chance to apply for a permanent job. My boss named a few temps she hoped to retain, I said “What about me!”

She said “I don’t want you as a temp Mike, I want you as a permanent member of the team.”

Everyone wanted me get the job, a lady I trained was quite upset that she got a job when I didn’t.

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