How many qualifications do we need before we dont get the job?

I am fervently a supporter of Lifelong learning. However, now I am getting towards the end of my career, rather than at the beginning of it, I am beginning to ask questions, such as, how many qualifications do you need before you dont get the job?

I was one of the believers in lifelong learning as I said. I have practised that credo for the last (embarassingly many) years, through music school, secondary school, Colleges of Further and Higher Education and Universities. However, one thing has begin to strike me over the past 15 years and that is, the amount of lifelong learning you have had and the attention to reskilling you have put in does not guarantee you the job, whatsoever.

I had this conversation with the government in 1998. I asked them why I could not get a teaching job. Various scenarios were suggested by them, like I got a PGCE. Surprise, I never got into a PGCE either. Something about O Level Mathematics, even though I have a degree in Accounting which includes Quantitative Methods and Advanced Calculus. I never got a teaching job in Further Education either despite masses of silly interviews where a lot of interviewers demonstrated the most profound lack of knowledge of my educational qualifications and background and some of them were downright rude, if I remember rightly.

At one and the same time as that I remember reading various publications of a personnel nature, whereby it was being stipulated that everyone has degrees now. That's strange, I thought only about 10% of the total population of the UK had degrees but I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong.

So, no teaching; however my complaint does not stop there. I have found this to be the attitude of many employers over the past 15 years, yet there is nothing wrong with my ability to hold down a job; I am in good health and very capable.However, on the other hand I hear nothing but complaints from employers that their staff are semi-skilled cant read and write, etc. Well whose fault is that if they dont employ the right people?

There is a series of fatal embraces in all these arguments. One can only go so far in lifelong learning and get so many qualifications before one is duty bound to say to oneself that it is not a fault of lifelong learning and one's individual efforts that one does not get the job. The problem is with employers who do not know what they want, or how to achieve it. So maybe its time that employers themselves did a little lifelong learning, or got a little bit of knowledge. And as for the government's latest pronoucement about shifting funds away from LLL, I think that illustrates the amount of ignorance there really is about the whole process.

It seems to me that people dont really want lifelong learning; sadly, because if they did, the employers would have nothing to complain about and nor would the government. One wonders in fact, whether there is not a deliberate attempt to deprive people from learning, so that the government can stay in business? Certainly precious little is being done to help the lifelong learner. Were it so, then someone as educated as me would be able to get work and that, I am afraid to say, is simply NOT the case.