Interesting Omission

While on the hunt for jobs, I’ve had to apply for unemployment for the first time in my career. Weird feeling, but it’s nice to know that Illinois has kind of gotten with the times. Basically Illinois has www.illinoisskillsmatch.com. The guy at the unemployment office called it “Illinois’ Monster.com.” I thought that was a really interesting way to put it. Also, it’s NOT optional. In order to get unemployment, you have to be signed up.

It’s definitely cool, but I do feel sorry for some of the older crowd that has never touched a computer. This has got to be an overwhelming addition to the problems they are already having. Still, I guess it’s good for everyone to use it. Probably makes it easier for employers to find desperate employees though.

One section of the site that I liked was the ability to choose the skills you have, and how long you’ve been using them. Lotus was there, although it seemed to be under weird categories that I wouldn’t have necessarily thought to have looked. Also, they had a certifications section. You could mark down how long you had been certified in different technologies. When I got there I thought “Great, there’s a TON of IBM certs, Lotus will be there for sure.” But lo and behold, Notes and Domino CLP’s were not listed anywhere. There must have been 20 different IBM certs including Informix, but no Lotus. I just thought that was a weird one NOT to have. Didn’t make me feel overly secure in my job search either. 🙁