Jaymie Robb

Hi all, I'm Jaymie, I'm 21, and I'm from East Kilbride. Since leaving school at 15 I’ve been in and out of courses and jobs within a very large variety of occupations. My most recent job (prior to this one) was an admin role within Scottish Power, however it was a temporary position and I left that in November 2008 to have a baby. My beautiful bouncing baby girl was born December 15th 2008 and was named Melissa – she’s my biggest achievment to date, and my pride and joy!

In May 2009 I started looking for admin roles to go back to part time...this was earlier than I had planned, however my better half had been made redundant. Months passed and before we knew it Christmas was nearly here, neither of us had a job yet and we were feeling really down about it.

At this point I decided I was going to put some use to all the free time we had between us and do some voluntary work. I knew I wanted to do some work with kids, kids that needed extra help / support. I got in touch with an organization called Covey who are also based in Blantyre and the role I was looking at was to become a befriender. 

Coming towards the end of the training I was starting to think about changing the type of jobs I had been applying to, and thinking more of changing my line of work to do something of the same sort as I was with Covey.

Just at the point of discussing my thoughts with others, the jobcentre phoned me about a payroll administrator position that had become available (I had done payroll previously for Freescale/Motorola), at this point I told them about what my thoughts were, and how I was going to change the types of work I had been applying for. They told me about 2 positions that was available within ‘youth work’. I had an idea of what youth work was and decided to give it a go.

I got the interview and was extremely nervous when I walked into the room – I’d never been interviewed by three people before let alone people as scary as Wendy, Joanne and Barry. I thought I’d blown the interview because I got a little bit emotional whilst talking about ‘why I wanted to be a youth worker’ – however its only because I feel passionate about it.

Wendy called me later in the afternoon and I was sooooo excited!  I couldn’t believe my luck!

It's been four weeks since I and the fabby wee team started, and I’ve been loving every minute. We’ve all had a shot at doing different things, and things we wouldn’t even normally try, but we’ve been doing it, and getting to meet all sorts of new people. I’m looking forward to getting based so that I can build up relationships that will last (maybe more than a week), and Im going to be the best I can be for the young people. I hope they take to me, lol.