After university, I was unemployed for a time and two things helped me to find new jobs and dramatically improve my income level: a) learning Perl on my own dur

After university, I was unemployed for a time and two things helped me to find new jobs and dramatically improve my income level: a) learning Perl on my own during the unemployment period* and writing two open source programs, thus demonstrating my skill with the language and impressing my first employer; b) getting a three month state-paid Java course (SCJP) and getting to know the Java-API and environment. Self-motivation, training, a certain amount of luck - there are numerous factors to getting a good job. For some lazy slobs, it may be getting their welfare money reduced. But for others it may be getting a longer period of welfare and training so they can learn something new which allows them "to do what they love". I think it is not enough to talk about getting people into any kind of job, as if having a job, no matter what, is sufficient or necessary to justify their existence. We need to help people get into the right jobs, and those jobs need to be paid fair wages. * Programming was(is) more fun than playing DAoC all day.