Have you ever met anybody who enjoys applying for jobs? Unlikely! Similar to the way in which hospitals are associated with sickness, looking for a job is associated with either dissatisfaction or insecurity. I’m going to stick my neck out and suggest that online job applications are repetitively dull, or difficult, not to mention demotivating experiences, especially if done without a helping hand. Nevertheless, they are the norm- a norm which has also been actively embraced and expanded by government employment policy, which seeks to use digital employment services as a lever to “get people online”.
My research focuses on the experience of migrants looking for jobs online, something that all benefits claimants in the UK have been mandated to do since the 2012 Welfare Act. I look at intersections between literacy practices and discourses in online job searches, to find out why, regardless of their education level, looking for work online appears to be difficult for many migrants. In my analysis, I look at job applications in separate but interconnected layers of talk, actions, resources, texts, discourses and underlying motivating activity. In this talk, I present an application for a glass collecting job as an instantiation of a literacy event, in which I challenge popular discourses about the ease and convenience of online job applications with the reality of my participant’s experiences.
Literacies Log 