Learners on our My Gaps programme in Cambridge set up their own shop in the city centre. The pop-up shop which they organised, promoted and ran for 2 days, was a great way to show off the skills they had learned from their retail training.

I missed the morning part of today’s session, as I was at an interview. It was an interview for a waitressing job at Giraffe in Cambridge, and I’ve landed myself a trial day shift this Sunday! Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

Laptops at the ready! Today involved a lot of CV reading and tweaking. I had brought my CVs in on a USB memory stick, as I have 3. I have one ‘general’ CV for applying for jobs to just get me by, one CV for jobs that entail writing, as that is something I am very much interested in and one for Mortuary Cosmetology which would be my chosen career path.

Today was mostly about focusing on our personal statements but we seemed to go about it in an utterly different way to how I have ever done before.

Today we were bribed with sweets. I’m kidding- we played a good game of “I have never”, in which the participants had 16 various sweets. Jacqui called out statements such as “I have never been to Europe” and if you HAVE done whatever it was, you ate a sweet. The first person to get rid of all of their sweets won.. unfortunately I came second... still, a minor victory!

So, Cambridge Job Centre had told me that I had to attend a mandatory employability course. Naturally, I was unhappy. I knew what I was doing, I had a CV and I had been employed several times in the past. I felt it was just more time that was unnecessarily being filled.