118,000

Today I received some good news! 118,000 more people have become unemployed in the UK since November. That's 118,000 more people that can read my blog. Wahoo!

I'm being ironic. Though I'm sure the extra 118,000 people would probably enjoy reading my blog in between the long hours of daytime television...

Anyway, unemployment is now at 2,685 million and though there are jobs currently, there aren't 2,685 million of them.

So what useful advice are we being offered?

The BBC have a number of patronisingly useful pages to help you get on in the unemployment queue:

1. How to Cope with Unemployment

They tell you about negotiating redundancy, how to claim benefits, how to cope with debts, and they also advise you to, um, apply for a job. Helpful indeed.

2. How to Write a Successful CV

Ok, so some people have shocking CVs, most people don't. Again, really helpful BBC.

3. How to Get a Job in...

Retail, Engineering, Manufacturing, Visual Effects, Starting a Business. I don't want to do any of those.

If that is the quality of the information that we are furnished with in order to get employment, it is no surprise that 2,685 million of us are without work. Unfortunately the advice we're given is plain common sense and frankly it's insulting to think that those things haven't already occured to us.

This goes back to the very first thing I said about stereotypes. Young people are not all lazy bums who can't be bothered applying for work. 22.3% of 16-24 year olds are out of work - that's coming up to 1 in 4 and far too high.

In the same way, all unemployed people are not scroungers who have no intention of ever working. It is these people that get the publicity on the news, but the average unemployed person is most likely intelligent, conscientious, and desperate to get a job.

The problem is still supply and demand. So 18,000 people managed to get jobs, but that still isn't high enough. There are a couple of solutions, but none of them will work in the short-term, and one of them is definitely very unpopular.

1. Companies could be a little more optimistic. Investing in a new workforce is risky, but likely to improve business prospects in the long-term. If there were more incentives for this then hopefully it would be the kick up the backside that the economy needed in order to flush the market with lots of lovely jobs.

2. University is, in my opinion, the biggest hindrance to young people getting jobs. The whole university culture in Britain is changing. Higher fees mean that students will have to think twice before committing. Unfortunately students don't seem to have been put off as much as they should really be. You see the problem is that young people do degrees because they haven't got anything better to do.

Germany has a whole load of great apprentice schemes designed to train young people to do skilled labour. The UK doesn't. We instead are teaching people about Lady Gaga and David Beckham: if you can't get into a good university to do your degree, there's no point in doing it at all - all you need is someone with that same degree from a better university and suddenly you've lost out on another job.

I'm going to make a prediction here. If English students decide that they don't want to be students anymore and start getting themselves on apprenticeships and training schemes straight out of school and college then English unemployment will go down. The Scottish and Welsh students still get a massively subsidised education at university, even though English students pay £9,000 a year (fair, isn't it) and so will continue to use university as a way of further procrastinating those big life-changing decisions.

I predict Scottish and Welsh unemployment will keep on rising over the next few years...